A Student Companion To

With the generous support of Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau

The Raymond Foundation Contents section 1: The Book and Its Context page 2 Who Was John Steinbeck? | Ellen MacKay page 3What Was the Dust Bowl? | Ellen MacKay page 6 Primary Sources Steinbeck Investigates the Migrant Laborer Camps Ellen MacKay: Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and the Look of the Dust Bowl The Novel’s Reception The Wider Impact of The Grapes of Wrath page 10 What Makes The Grapes of Wrath Endure? Jonathan Elmer: Steinbeck’s Mythic Novel George Hutchinson: Hearing The Grapes of Wrath Christoph Irmscher: Teaching The Grapes of Wrath section 2: Sustainability, Bloomington, and the World of The Grapes of Wrath page 14 What Does Literature Have to Do with Sustainability? | Ellen MacKay page 15 Nature Writing Now: An Interview with Scott Russell Sanders An Excerpt from A Conservationist Manifesto | Scott Russell Sanders page 18 What Can Be Done?: Sustainablilty Then and Now Michael Hamburger Sara Pryor Matthew Auer Tom Evans page 22 Primary Access: The 1930s in Our Midst Ellen MacKay: Thomas Hart Benton, the Indiana Murals, and The Grapes of Wrath Nan Brewer: The Farm Security Administration Photographs: A Treasure of the IU Art Museum Christoph Irmscher: “The Toto Picture”: Writers on Sustainability at the Lilly Library section 3: The Theatrical Event of The Grapes of Wrath page 26 How Did The Grapes of Wrath Become a Play? | Ellen MacKay page 27 The Sound of The Grapes of Wrath: Ed Comentale: Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads, and the Art and Science of Migratin’ Guthrie Tells Steinbeck’s Story: The Ballad of “The Joads” page 31 Another Look at the Joads’ Odyssey: Guthrie’s Illustrations. An Interview with Randy White section 4: Recommended Resources and Events

A page from the manuscript of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath courtesy of the Library of Congress. Welcome To the Show!

The College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University is Cardinal Stage is thrilled to be presenting The Grapes of Wrath pleased to welcome you to the Cardinal Stage production of in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences’ second The Grapes of Wrath. This fine adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Themester, on sustain • ability. We extend special thanks to gripping novel is produced in connection with the College’s Kirstine Lindemann and Stephen Watt for their unflagging 2010 Themester initiative, “sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small support. As it did last year, the Themester initiative has helped us Planet,” a semester-long program that combines academic to reach out to more students and engage the community more courses, public lectures and exhibits, film showings, and other deeply and broadly than ever before; it represents a wonderful events connected to this most vital topic. While this program extension of IU’s intellectual and social interests into the town of prominently features interconnected coursework for Indiana Bloomington and beyond. We are thrilled to be a part of it. University students, many events—like this production of The The materials in this educational packet are meant to enrich Grapes of Wrath—are open to the public. the experience of seeing The Grapes of Wrath by illuminating Forming the core of this initiative are over two hundred Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl milieu, its vibrant traces in Bloomington, inter-related courses on the Bloomington campus that range and its wider world of literary, historical and ecological context. in topic from ecology to creative writing, from economic and The contributors to this work deserve special thanks: Matthew public policy to conservation, energy, and climate change. Auer, Nan Brewer, Ed Comentale, Jonathan Elmer, Tom Evens, In addition, a number of spectacular events are planned for each Michael Hamburger, George Hutchinson, Christoph Irmscher, month of the fall semester to which all are invited. In October, Sara Pryor, and Scott Sanders. Thanks, too, to intern Emily for example, Patten and Branigan lecturers, world-renowned MacDonald, for her research and transcription, and to Ellen experts invited by IU Faculty, will address topics of crucial MacKay, Cardinal’s Director of Educational Outreach, for importance to sustainability: climate change and tropical assembling, editing and contributing this outstanding document. conservation. In November, highly acclaimed writers Thomas Cardinal Stage Company takes it as its mission to make world- Friedman, author of The World is Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and class theatre and high-quality educational programming Wendell Berry will give public lectures on campus. Straddling accessible to all local children and families. We are able to achieve October and November, SoFA gallery will host an exhibition of this mission thanks to the financial support of the Bloomington artist and activist Subhankar Banerjee, a prominent nature Community Arts Commission and the City of Bloomington, photographer, while the IU Art Museum offers sustainability- and because of a very generous grant in support of this Themester themed tours throughout the semester. Other events include collaboration from Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau. screenings and discussions of films such as The 11th Hour and An Inconvenient Truth. And now, enjoy! Themester, a semester-long initiative launched by the College of Arts and Sciences and Dean Bennett Bertenthal Yours, in 2009, is intended to engage students and the entire community in a collective learning experience about a timely, Randy White even urgent, issue. The 2011 topic, “War and Peace,” will continue in this spirit. To read more about Themester and to access a Calendar of Events, please visit the Themester home page at http://themester.indiana.edu/.

Stephen Watt Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education College of Arts and Sciences Indiana University section 1: The Book and Its Context

Who Was John Steinbeck? by Ellen MacKay

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, a region At the moment of its release, however, the book was decidedly known as The Salad Bowl of the Nation for its record output of controversial. Californian farmers objected to their depiction as vegetables and fruits. His family was prominent but modest of exploitative and unfeeling; some Oklahoma migrants denounced means; his father, at one time the treasurer of Monterey County, the squalid picture they felt Steinbeck offered of their day-to-day tried out several lines of work, including feed store owner and existence. One California County banned it for irreligious flour mill manager. Steinbeck later wrote evocatively of his happy content, bad language and socialist politics, but the effect was childhood, spent in the dazzling outdoors. Weekends on the coast only to entrench the novel’s reception as an extremely timely and weekdays in the valley helped to develop his particular regional work, perfectly attuned to the complex interplay of American flavor—Steinbeck is often recognized as a founding father of individualism and the spirit of collective uplift that pervaded the Californian fiction. pre-war Roosevelt era. In 1919 he enrolled at Surprisingly, Steinbeck’s next book did little to capitalize Stanford University but upon his success. Exhausted from his research in the Okie camps, followed no particular a strained marriage and ill health, he set off with his friend Ed course of study. He Ricketts, a longtime friend and marine biologist, to study the earned the money to pay ecology of the Sea of Cortez. He and Ricketts published a catalogue for his classes in English, and a chronicle of the species they collected in 1941 called The Classics, Composition Sea of Cortez. Critics have come to see Steinbeck’s collaboration and Natural Science by with Ricketts as deeply influential; the documentary style that working summers on characterizes Steinbeck, and in particular, his non-teleological farms and ranches; the structure (in other words, his tendency to let things play out experience cemented his without driving toward any particular end or purpose) have been John Steinbeck in a photograph from the 1930s. lifelong empathy for attributed to Ricketts’s scientific philosophy. agricultural laborers and Steinbeck then turned his attention to the war effort, and his perception that the soul of America resided in its soil. After six became a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in years at Stanford and without a degree, Steinbeck tried his luck 1942 (his columns were later collected in Once There Was a War, as a journalist in New York. The experiment was a failure, and he published in 1958). His post-war returned to California to turn his hand to novel-writing. The 1930s works, Cannery Row (1945) and were a period of tremendous productivity for Steinbeck. His first The Pearl (1947) were not embraced real success, Tortilla Flat (1935), was a comic tale about the alcohol- by critics, and Steinbeck’s most fueled exploits of four paisanos in pre-Prohibition Monterey. visible influence was as a writer for The book was made into a 1942 movie starring Spencer Tracy the cinema: his screenplay for Elia and provided Steinbeck enough money to buy a home and the Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) and confidence to embrace his career choice. He followed it up with a the film adaptation of his East of series of novels that became known as his Dust Bowl trilogy: Eden (1955, starring James Dean) In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of brought him more popular success Wrath (1939). Each of these took up the subject of migrant farm than his fiction. After East of Eden, labor and the cultural forces that ignored, sentimentalized or he ceased working on novels exploited them. Of the three works, The Grapes of Wrath was entirely; his last successful book, considered Steinbeck’s greatest triumph. An advance edition of Travels with Charley (1962), returns nearly 20,000 copies sold out immediately, and at the height of its to the travel-log style Steinbeck popularity, the book sold 10,000 copies a week. In 1940, it won tried out in The Sea of Cortez. The poster for John Ford’s the Pulitzer Prize, and it remains one of the most read and admired In 1965 he received the Nobel film adaptation of The Grapes works of Depression-era literature. The novel’s reputation was Prize; the experience was somewhat of Wrath. The film clearly capitalized on the runaway enhanced by John Ford’s film adaptation (released 1940), starring marred by a piece that ran in The success of Steinbeck’s novel. Henry Fonda, for which Ford won the Oscar for Best Director. New York Times the day after the the book and its context 3

Depression-era disenfranchised; by the 1960s, The Grapes of Wrath was viewed by some as a period piece, and Steinbeck as an author long past his prime. But scholars now tend to recognize the allegorical strain of Steinbeck’s later writing style as experimental rather than didactic, and they point out that his politics are not merely an ideologue’s reaffirmation of the leftist bottom line. In his Dust Bowl trilogy, he is as likely to expose the exploitation of workers by pro-union agitators as he is to indict the callousness of business owners. Steinbeck said himself that he wished to be remembered for his commitment to stories that enlarge humanity’s capacity for compassion and mutual respect. As he explained when he accepted his Nobel Prize:

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous Mr. and Mrs. Frank Pipkin being recorded by Charles Todd (left) at the Shafter dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, Migratory Labor Camp, Shafter, California, 1940. Photograph by Robert Hemmig. Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant-Worker Collection. the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s Courtesy of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Mrs Pipkin is proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry thought by many to have been the inspiration for Mrs. Joad in Steinbeck’s The in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck met Pipkin (and Todd) while researching his novel. war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally announcement, “Does a Writer with a Moral Vision of the 1930s flags of hope and of emulation. Deserve the Nobel Prize?” As the title implies, Steinbeck was never quite able to break free of his reputation as a spokesperson for the

What Was the Dust Bowl? by Ellen MacKay

“The Dust Bowl” is a phrase coined by Robert Geiger, an Associated Press journalist who was traveling through Oklahoma on April 14, 1935, the day the worst of the dust storms hit. Geiger wrote about a fast-moving cloud of desiccated soil so thick it blocked drivers from seeing the hoods of their own cars as they struggled to escape it.

Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the storm:

On the fourteenth day of April of nineteen thirty five, There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky. You could see that dust storm comin’, the cloud looked deathlike black, And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track.

—Woody Guthrie (1912-1967). From “Dust Storm Disaster” Herschel C. Logan, Dust Storm, 1938. From the collection of the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art. Black Sunday, as April 14th came to be known, was the forever. By 1930, East Coast families were heading to the plains culmination of a terrible confluence of harsh weather, economic in great numbers to escape the crushing conditions of the desperation and agricultural mismanagement that spanned a Depression. Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas decade and altered America’s environmental consciousness were advertised to eager migrants as wheat-bearing Edens, with 4 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

soil so rich that anyone with an acre and a tractor could be certain California sought to keep down its welfare rolls by keeping the to secure a decent living. The Southern Plains soon filled with poor out. Those that did manage to resettle in the San Joaquin inexperienced farmers who plowed up millions of acres of virgin Valley forced the expansion of other state amenities, including sod and planted and re-planted the same terrain to eke every schools and municipal hospitals. New facilities required a rise in dime they could out of it. When the summer of 1931 turned very local taxes, which again increased the local resentment of Okies dry, the wheat withered in the fields and the thin layer of parched (as most Dust Bowl refugees were then called, though only about topsoil turned to dust, which was picked up by the area’s strong 20% were from Oklahoma). Meanwhile, farm owners exploited winds and blown into the air. Dust invaded homes and settled the heavy influx of eager workers by paying impossibly low wages. into people’s eyes and throats, causing a respiratory ailment Families settled into makeshift camps with no plumbing or called dust pneumonia. The Red Cross sent masks for students to electricity; children as young as four and five were forced to pick wear to school and mothers doused their children with dubious cotton to help sustain their households. When floods washed home remedies like turpentine and skunk oil to ease their through the valley in 1938, the resulting crisis in employment, breathing. But the drought lingered, and conditions worsened. health and hygiene became a national disgrace. By the mid-1930s, various artists including Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck were already at work describing the Okie migration. After the floods, their work caught the attention of the national press and touched off a wave of outrage. With the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, Eleanor Roosevelt came to California to tour the camps and discuss migrant issues with California authorities. The ACLU challenged the legality of the Indigent Law, and in 1941, the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on interstate mobility (Edwards v. California). But perhaps the most lasting impact of the Dust Bowl migration was the attention it brought to the plight of migrant farm workers. The results have been decidedly mixed. Before the Okie resettlement, crop picking was largely the province of Mexican and Filipino men and roused little interest in social reformers. Though the sight of white, American families living Buried machinery in barn lot in Dallas, South Dakota. Image courtesy of “like animals” (as one contemporary journalist reported), the United States Department of Agriculture. advanced the cause of unionization in agricultural work, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which outlawed child labor in all Farmers responded by redoubling their efforts for each factory settings, did not impose any age limits on agricultural ensuing harvest. As the drought continued from 1931 to 1935, labor until 1974, and these are more and more dust was sheared off the fields and sent into the relatively slight. And because atmosphere, causing huge dust storms to rage across the plains. the rise in manufacturing When crop after crop failed, families began abandoning their caused by the onset of World farms to head for greener pastures in the Pacific Northwest. War II brought prosperity to the By 1940, fully one quarter of the panhandle population, or nation, the conditions of poor roughly 500,000 people, had abandoned the afflicted states. farm workers have been The migration westward, largely to California’s fecund San seen by some to have cured Joaquin Valley, took on complex political dimensions. Before themselves. Scholars debate 1941, states held the right to restrict interstate travel. California’s whether the iconic images of 1933 Indigent Law barred travelers without a documented means the Dust Bowl have helped or of support the right to settle in the state. Los Angeles’s infamous hindered the rights of migrant “Bum Blockade” (1936) sent police to major railway and road laborers, many of whom are crossings to turn back desperate migrants. Hostility to refugees Hispanic immigrants living stemmed from the cost of supporting this new population; on the margins of the social because the farm states had lobbied successfully to keep New contract. The myth of the Joseph Dusek, “Plains Farms Deal labor laws from extending to agricultural work, the only Dust Bowl is that eventually, Need Trees,” 1940. A WPA Poster government support available to strapped crop-picking families hardscrabble Americans advocating tree planting to stanch was state-based. Already suffering from high unemployment, overcame adversity and gained the Dust Bowl. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. economic security by sheer the book and its context 5 grit. But for most crop pickers today, hard work and self-sacrifice Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant 200 are not enough to secure access to the American dream. million trees between Abilene, Texas and the Canadian border to The environmental upshot of the Dust Bowl was, in the main, literally root the soil in place and create a wind break along the less ambivalent. Though in 1909 the US Bureau of Soils decreed plains’ stormiest corridor. By 1938, blowing dust had been that “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the reduced by 65%. Finally, in the fall of 1939, the drought ended nation possesses,” by the mid-1930s, agricultural experts began to and the crops came back to life. But the migration of the 1930s float the hypothesis that the disaster in the Southern Plains was had permanently resettled the farming population; the semi-arid largely caused by unsustainable farming. The most prominent region of the Southern US would no longer be mistaken for proponent of this view, Hugh Bennett (of the US Department of the America’s grain belt. Interior), took his case to Capitol Hill, and in 1935 he successfully Bennett’s approach to resource management was ahead of its lobbied the Federal government to adopt the Soil Conservation Act. time. He advocated the reversion of much of the Great Plains into Farmers didn’t take the legislation well; they continued to put all uncultivated grassland and saw environmental conservation as the their resources and efforts into the bumper crop that would only path to successful food production. Recent research into the replenish their losses. The government reponded by paying a dangers of agricultural monoculture (single crop or species farming) dollar an acre to anyone who practiced crop rotation, strip farming, have borne out his arguments, though only by demonstrating how contour plowing, terracing, or any of its soil-sustaining practices. routinely his strategies have been neglected.

The Federal Government and the Dust Bowl Migrant Problem Frances Perkins Federal Hearings on the Dust Bowl Migration and the labor issues it raised took place at the US Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945 end of a decade of strife. This article, from 1940, highlights the efforts of the Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, to bring workers rights legislation to the agricultural sector. Frances Perkins was the first woman to hold a Cabinet position in US history and therefore the first woman to enter in the line of succession for the US presidency. Miss Perkins Asks For Migrant Security consideration. Wages should be fixed under State Perkins was appointed by Roosevelt after proving By Byron Darnton laws in the localities and not by Congress, which herself as a vigorous proponent of industrial reform. Special to The New York Times is a long way off in Washington. A 1902 graduate of Mount Holyoke, she taught high Washington, May 6, 1940 “I think this step would not be unwelcome to school before returning to school to earn an MA in public-spirited employers in the farming areas.” sociology at Columbia in 1910. Her first position in the Secretary of Labor Perkins stirred up a hornet’s […] public sector was head of the New York Consumers nest today by recommending that the Social Discussing another phase of the problem, Miss League, and it was in that role that she witnessed first- Security Act and the Wage-Hour Act be extended Perkins expressed disapproval of those who look hand the gruesome Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. to cover workers on industrialized farms, that upon the migration of farm workers as an evil Her tenacious advocacy for better working conditions being exactly what the operators of those farms thing. led to her appointment in various positions for the have opposed. “It is a mark of vitality, of the dynamic New York State Government; by 1926, she had risen to Miss Perkins set forth her ideas in testimony character of American life,” she declared. “I have the post of chair of the New York State Industrial before the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee of seen in the depressed areas of European countries Commission. In 1929, Roosevelt, then Governor of New the Senate, which is looking into the status of people who, if they took a three-hour train ride, York, appointed her Industrial Commissioner. When migrant farm workers with the view of asking could get jobs. But they were so greatly attached he won the presidency in 1932, he brought her in as Congress to take some action to better their lot. to their home communities that they would not Secretary of Labor, where she remained in the Cabinet Not only did she contend that the migrants who move. Our habit of movement is not a bad habit. until his death in 1945. Perkins is remembered as one pick up a precarious living by wage or piece labor on “This national characteristic should not be of the most influential members of Roosevelt’s New factorized farms should get the benefit of Federal deplored, but it should be handled in a way to Deal administration; under her sway, child labor social legislation, but she held that the States protect the migrant from destruction. We should laws, work week hour limitations, minimum wage had been lax in extending to them the protection think of these people as up-and-coming, not as standards, social security, and unemployment of workmen’s compensation laws, accident dangerous element.” insurance were all implemented. She remains the prevention laws and child labor laws. […] longest serving Secretary of Labor in Presidential She painted a gloomy picture of the plight of the Senator Elbert D. Thomas of Utah, a member of history. Perkins died in 1965 at the age of 85. migrant. Beset by abnormally low labor standards, the committee, commented that whereas in the supplied with few health safeguards and with past American migrants had benefited themselves, sadly limited educational opportunities for his they now moved from a bad condition to a worse children, he faces a dark future, she said. condition, largely because “the frontier is closed.” “The time has come,” the Secretary told the “There is no simple answer to this remarkably committee, “to think of extending social security complex question,” the Senator continued. “But it legislation to the agricultural workers, especially is essential that our government take the migrant those on industrialized farms. As I have observed problem out of the realm of romance and put it in conditions, things are always better for the worker the realm of economic fact. if his hours of labor are limited. Under the present system, there is no regulation whatever, and workers are often forced, especially under the piece-rate system, to work very long hours indeed. Frances Perkins sharing a joke with FDR, “Certainly the application of wage and hour around 1940. Photo courtesy of the Frances legislation to these workers should be given Perkins Center. 6 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

Primary Sources

Steinbeck Investigates the hatred of the stranger occurs in the whole range of human history, from the most primitive village form to our own highly organized Migrant Laborer Camps industrial farming. The migrants are hated for the following reasons, that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are In 1936, John Steinbeck was commissioned by editor George West to carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and write a series of articles about the migrant experience for The San the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed Francisco News. West thought Steinbeck’s strong account of farm to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the worker strikes in his novel In Dubious Battle made him a good season’s crops. They are never received into a community nor into candidate for the assignment. The result, “The Harvest Gypsies” was the life of a community. Wanderers in fact, they are never allowed originally published in seven parts between October 5 and October 12, to feel at home in the communities that demand their services. 1936. Photographs by Dorothea Lange accompanied the text. Let us see what kind of people they are, where they come from, This excerpt, from the first installment, helps us see how Steinbeck’s and the routes of their wanderings. In the past they have been of research living among the “Okies” became the basis of The Grapes several races, encouraged to come and often imported as cheap of Wrath. labor; Chinese in the early period, then Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. These were foreigners, and as such they were ostracized ______and segregated and herded about. At this season of the year, when California’s great crops are If they attempted to organize they were deported or arrested, coming into harvest, the heavy grapes, the prunes, the apples and and having no advocates they were never able to get a hearing for lettuce and the rapidly maturing cotton, our highways swarm with their problems. But in recent years the foreign migrants have begun the migrant workers, that shifting group of nomadic, poverty- to organize, and at this danger signal they have been deported in stricken harvesters driven by hunger and the threat of hunger from great numbers, for there was a new reservoir from which a great crop to crop, from harvest to harvest, up and down the state and quantity of cheap labor could be obtained. into Oregon to some extent, and into Washington a little. But it is The drought in the middle west has driven the agricultural California which has and needs the majority of these new gypsies. populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and It is a short study of these wanderers that these articles will Texas westward. Their lands are destroyed and they can never go undertake. There are at least 150,000 homeless migrants wandering back to them. up and down the state, and that is an army large enough to make it Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling important to every person in the state. automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept To the casual traveler on the great highways the movements of any pay so that they may eat and feed their children. And this is a the migrants are mysterious if they are seen at all, for suddenly the new thing in migrant labor, for the foreign workers were usually roads will be filled with open rattletrap cars loaded with children imported without their children and everything that remains of and with dirty bedding, with fire-blackened cooking utensils. The their old life with them. boxcars and gondolas on the railroad lines will be filled with men. They arrive in California usually having used up every resource And then, just as suddenly, they will have disappeared from the to get here, even to the selling of the poor blankets and utensils and main routes. On side roads and near rivers where there is little tools on the way to buy gasoline. They arrive bewildered and beaten travel the squalid, filthy squatters’ camp will have been set up, and and usually in a state of semi-starvation, with only one necessity to the orchards will be filled with pickers and cutters and driers. face immediately, and that is to find work at any wage in order that The unique nature of California agriculture requires that these the family may eat. migrants exist, and requires that they move about. Peaches and And there is only one field in California that can receive them. grapes, hops and cotton cannot be harvested by a resident Ineligible for relief, they must become migratory field workers. population of laborers. For example, a large peach orchard which […] requires the work of 20 men the year round will need as many as And so they move, frantically, with starvation close behind 2000 for the brief time of picking and packing. And if the migration them. And in this series of articles we shall try to see how they live of the 2000 should not occur, if it should be delayed even a week, and what kind of people they are, what their living standard is, what the crop will rot and be lost. is done for them and to them, and what their problems and needs Thus, in California we find a curious attitude toward a group are. For while California has been successful in its use of migrant that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and labor, it is gradually building a human structure which will certainly they are hated. Arriving in a district they find the dislike always change the State, and may, if handled with the inhumanity and meted out by the resident to the foreigner, the outlander. This stupidity that have characterized the past, destroy the present system of agricultural economics. the book and its context 7

How Did Contemporary Americans in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, See the Dust Bowl? “Migrant Mother” and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. and the Look of the Migration. (reprinted from Popular Photography, Feb. 1960; quoted by Ellen MacKay in http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html).

The woman, Florence Owens Thompson, became the face of the Dust Bowl when Lange’s picture of her ran alongside two stories in the San Francisco News: “Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squaller [sic]” (March 10, 1936) and “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean to This Mother and Her Children?” (March 11, 1936). Thompson never embraced her role as the Dust Bowl’s mater dolorosa, complaining until her death that she never profited from her celebrity, though she did take some pride in the praise heaped on her image. Lange, on the other hand, became one of the most renowned photographers of the WPA and beyond. The pathos of “Migrant Mother” is only one dimension of her artistic sensibility. She also captured the bitter ironies of American culture in the 1930s. Consider, for instance, this photograph of a billboard that greeted desperate farm workers as they made their way Westward:

Dorothea Lange, “Destitute pea-pickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Probably the most iconic representation of the Dust Bowl is Dorothea Lange’s photograph, usually called “Migrant Mother,” which Lange took while working as a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration, a branch of Roosevelt’s Dorothea Lange, Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by National Association of Manufacturers. Works Projects Administration. March, 1937. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. The photograph was taken in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Twenty-four years later, Lange described how she got the shot: When World War II broke out and the FSA was dissolved, Lange went on to photograph Japanese internment camps for the I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if War Relocation Authority, producing images so critical of drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my America’s treatment of its immigrant citizens that they were presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked impounded by the Army. me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and Lange died in 1965. She remains one of the few major closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or women artists to emerge from the artistic and political ferment her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She of America’s WPA years. said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat 8 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

“Hot and Immediate Fire”: filmed and dramatized and radio-acted – but, gentle reader, amid all the excitement let’s try to keep in mind what The Grapes of Wrath The Novel’s Reception is about: to wit, the slow murder of half a million innocent and worthy American citizens. The critical response to The Grapes of Wrath was overwhelmingly positive, though many reviewers were quick to point out that the work Louis Kronenberger, “Hungry Caravan.” was at least as important as a social document and a political lever as The Nation 148 (15 April, 1939), 440-1. it was a literary achievement. From the get-go, comparisons to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s powerful abolitionist novel) This is in many ways the most moving and disturbing social novel of were plentiful. Criticism, when it did arise, singled out the book’s our time. What is wrong with it, what is weak in it, what robs it of coarse language and harsh realism—some reviewers were repulsed the stature it clearly attempts, are matters that must presently be by its blood and dirt. Objections pointed out; but not at once. First it should be pointed out that The to the pro-worker politics of the Grapes of Wrath comes at a needed time in a powerful way. It comes, novel were largely raised by perhaps, as The Drapier’s Letters or Uncle Tom’s Cabin or some of the figures outside the literary social novels of Zola came. It burns with no pure gemlike flame, but establishment; in the last days with hot and immediate fire. It is, from any point of view, Steinbeck’s of the 1930s, pro-corporate best novel, but it does not make one wonder whether, on the basis of and anti-New Deal artists it, Steinbeck is now a better novelist than Hemingway or Dos Passos; and workers were scarce. it does not invoke comparisons; it simply makes one feel that The following excerpts provide Steinbeck is, in some way all his own, a force. some sense of the acclaim with The publishers refer to the book as “perhaps the greatest single which the novel was initially creative work that this country has produced.” This is a foolish and greeted, and the resentment and extravagant statement, but unlike most publishers’ statements, it frustration that followed from seems the result of honest enthusiasm, and one may hope that the some quarters. common reader will respond to the book with an enthusiasm of the same sort. And perhaps he will, for The Grapes of Wrath has, overwhelmingly, those two qualities most vital to a work of social protest: great indignation and great compassion. Its theme is large The cover of the first edition of The Grapes of Wrath, published by Viking and tragic and, on the whole, is largely tragically felt. No novel of Press in 1939. Unsigned, this first edition now sells for about $ 3,000. our day has been written out of a more genuine humanity, and none, The Lilly Library’s copy is currently on exhibit (see “The Toto Picture,” page 25). I think, is better calculated to awaken the humanity of others.

“Okies.” ______Time, 33 (17 April 1939), 87. Clifton Fadiman, “Books.” The New Yorker, (15 April 1939), 81-3 The Grapes of Wrath is the Okies’ saga. It is John Ernst Steinbeck’s longest novel (619 pages) and more ambitious than all his others If only a couple of million overcomfortable people can be brought to combined (Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, et al.). read it, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath may actually effect The publishers believe it is “perhaps the greatest modern American something like a revolution in their minds and hearts. It sounds like novel, perhaps the greatest single creative work this country has a crazy notion, I know, but I feel this book may just possibly do for ever produced.” It is not. But it is Steinbeck’s best novel, i.e., his our time what Les Misérables did for its, Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its, toughest and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, The Jungle for its. The Grapes of Wrath is the kind of art that’s poured his most realistic and, in its ending, his most melodramatic, his out of a crucible in which are mingled pity and indignation. It seems angriest and most idyllic. It is “great” in the way that Uncle Tom’s advisable to stress this point. A lot of readers and critics are going to Cabin was great – because it is inspired propaganda, half tract, half abandon themselves to orgies of ohing and ahing over Steinbeck’s human-interest story, emotionalizing a great theme. impressive literary qualities, happy to blink at the simple fact that Between chapters author Steinbeck speaks directly to the fundamentally his book is a social novel exposing social injustice reader in panoramic essays on the social significance of the Okies’ and calling, though never explicitly, for social redress. It’s going to story. Burning tracts in themselves, they are not a successful be a great and deserved best-seller; it’ll be read and praised by fiction experiment. In them a “social awareness” outruns artistic everyone; it will almost certainly win the Pulitzer Prize; it will be skill. Steinbeck is a writer, still, of great promise. But this novel’s big audience of readers will likely find in of one of the most impassioned and exciting books of the year. the book and its context 9

M[arjoy] L[loyd], “Off the Book Shelf.” The Wider Impact of Carmel [Calif.] Pine Cone, 21 April 1939, p.5 The Grapes of Wrath It is a powerful novel, written by a man who for a time lived among these migratory workers of our valleys in order that he might The columns excerpted below come from the scrapbooks of Charles L. himself fully understand their plight. In an old Ford truck Steinbeck Todd, a faculty member of City College’s dept. of Public Speaking whose moved from camp to camp and listened to their stories and saw interest in Elizabethan ballads eventually led him to the Farm Security their plight. They are Americans for six and seven generations back, Administration camps to document the musical culture of the Dust Bowl Americans who have lived in pride on their own land and been migration. While in New York, Todd had made the acquaintance of forced from it by the merciless forces of nature and the equally Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, among remorseless forces of the economic system. In telling the story of others. With the encouragement of these musicians and the support of the Joad family who left their land and journeyed to California, some New York acquaintances, Todd and his colleague, Robert Sonkin, Steinbeck has written a novel powerfully strong, strikingly beautiful recorded hundreds of songs that became a key collection of the Archive and full of human sympathy. The story is intensely gripping and of American Folk Songs at the Library of Congress. Among his fans once the family starts on their way it is almost impossible to leave was Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited Todd and Sonkin to play some of their recordings at a White House dinner in September of 1941 them till the end of the book. At the end their story is unsolved. It is (Roosevelt described her enthusiasm for the event in her syndicated unsolved because there is no solution. They are still with us in our column, “My Day”). valleys and on our highways. What is to become of them? Whether or not we agree with the economic views of Steinbeck Todd’s memorabilia from his time in the Tulare Migrant Camp we must bow to the power of his writing, its force, sheer beauty and includes extensive photographs and press clippings, some of which splendid characterization. He is peculiarly our own in California, bear directly upon the reception and history of Steinbeck’s book. While born of the country, steeped in its beauty and cruelty. He has recording his subjects, Todd met and became friends with Steinbeck, written a great book about a great people, a people who are now, due who was on site doing research for his novel. Here are some highlights to circumstances, Californians. No Californian should disregard from Todd’s scrapbook: this book and its message. It is for us and it is one of the greatest of ______American books. State-wide Ban on Book Sought A[rthur] D. Spearman, S.J. “Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Bakersfield, Aug. 22, 1939. The San Francisco Daily News. Branded as Red Propaganda by Father A. D. Spearman.” Mapping plans for State-wide action to follow in Kern County’s San Francisco Examiner, 4 June 1939, Section 1, p. 12 footsteps in banning John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” in The Grapes of Wrath may be summed up as a brief, written in terms schools and libraries, the Associated Farmers of Kern Country of human misery, for the adoption of the philosophy of life called today called on all organizations in the San Joaquin Valley to Communism. voice their approval of the action taken by the Kern County Board […] of Supervisors yesterday. Grapes of Wrath is a plea for a fundamental “change.” It does The appeal was made by W. B. Camp, president of the Kern not see any possibility of restoration of American life on a basis of County unit of the agricultural organization. the Ten Commandments, liberty under law, guidance from true Other agricultural organizations and civic groups indicated religion, or a relationship of mutual duty and right of employee and today they will join the fight on the book now being led by the employer. farmers, Camp said. Action on the book by the Supervisors is the It is a summons to revolution as the only way out of the complex first instance of its kind in California, it was pointed out today. social problem of our time. It points to collectivism in its longings, voiced by Ma Joad, and Casy, and Tom Joad for “our” land, worked Fresno to Keep Steinbeck Book; ‘Grapes of Wrath’ by “our” tractors, and enjoyment in “our” communal socials and Has Place in Literature County Librarian Says civic life. Fresno, Aug. 22, 1939. The San Francisco Daily News. The book ridicules those who see “reds” threatening American life. It honours and appeals for the adoption of Communism, but Regardless of what other communities may do about John tractfully refuses to use or accept the name. Steinbeck’s much publicized and often maligned book, “Grapes of Wrath,” public library patrons of Fresno County may take it or leave it as they like. This was the declaration today of Miss Sarah McCardle, country librarian, who said the book has a definite place in American literature and she ventured the opinion that the rough 10 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath passages of its text are far overshadowed by the characterization There are two versions why. and descriptive matter. Some Los Gatos folk and others say that Steinbeck, who took “We have had hundreds of requests for the book,” she said, the title of his chronicle of the dust bowl émigrés from Julia Ward “and cannot keep up with the demand. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” has himself trampled out “As far as prohibiting the book is concerned, we will not a bitter vintage of wrath – the enmity of the bewildered refugees attempt to dictate the reading tastes of our adult clientele.” from poverty and hunger whose cause he pleaded. There have been reports of threats against the author which ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Author Guards Self at induced him to retreat to an almost inaccessible citadel – a Moody Gulch From Threats refugee from the very economic refugees he sought to befriend. By Tom Cameron. Los Gatos, July 8. The New York Times. Steinbeck gave me his own version. Here it is: “Everything the people admire it destroys. It imposes a Sprawled in a cane chair on the porch of his rambling ranch personality upon him it thinks he should have – whether that house hidden on a wooded hilltop three miles from here, John personality fits him or no, it doesn’t seem to matter. Steinbeck, Don Quixote of the Okies, warily eyes the gravelled “There’s getting to be a fictitious so-and-so (Steinbeck road winding up Moody Gulch from his stoutly padlocked gates. speaks so frankly as he writes) out there in the public’s eye. It is not a happy man who sits there while the royalties roll He’s a straw man, and he bears my name. in from his best seller, “Grapes of Wrath,” for Steinbeck has “I don’t like him – that straw man,” Steinbeck complained. accumulated worries as well as wealth. “He’s not me – he’s the Steinbeck the public has created out of its With his wife Carol and their Doberman pinscher Bruga, own imagination and thinks out to be me.” Steinbeck formerly occupied a home on Greenwood Road in Steinbeck has a double-barreled plan for protecting himself. Los Gatos. It is, first, to keep strictly away from the public, and second, to Recently, however, they bought a place at the top of Moody “let the straw man stand out in front and take it.” Gulch, reinforced the fences and installed a big padlock on the entrance gate.

What Makes The Grapes of Wrath Endure?

The Grapes of Wrath has been steadily read, studied and argued was younger. By the time I finished the final tumultuous pages over since its first publication in 1939. Cardinal asked three in which Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn, “buried” in the professors in IU’s English Department to explain the enduring apple crate, and in which she offers her full breast to the appeal of the novel. starving old man, I was weeping. I had rarely been so moved, in a lifetime of reading. ______The Grapes of Wrath is not a masterpiece of prose style, nor Steinbeck’s is it especially remarkable in its characterization. The Joads Mythic Novel don’t feel like cardboard cutouts, but they don’t feel very complex as individuals either. We might say they cannot afford by Jonathan Elmer to be complex; the catastrophe in which they find themselves leaves no space for the expression of unique personality. Several years ago, I taught a class On the other hand, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, also a focusing on the 1930s, and I novel about a very poor family uprooted and on a desperate assigned The Grapes of Wrath. quest (they are taking the mother’s body to be buried in her I had read the book in high school— hometown), manages to make members of the family—the or thought I had. As I made my brothers Darl, Cash, and Jewel especially—vivid, if peculiar, way through the story, I realized Agnolo Bronzino, Head of personalities. The books are fundamentally different, however. that I must not have finished the a Smiling Woman. 1542-3. Although it may seem odd to say it, Faulkner’s novel is a book when I was seventeen. comedy, structurally speaking: it turns out that Anse Bundren As the Joads’ situation got more and more desperate, I found was not only burying one wife, he was acquiring another. myself in territory I had not traversed before, gripped by their The Grapes of Wrath is no comedy, that’s for sure. Is it a plight and the way what seemed like rock bottom kept opening tragedy? I don’t think so. Again a comparison might help. up a lower layer of misery. It was probably exactly what In some ways, Steinbeck is using the formula of the naturalist gripped me now that had led me to put aside the book when I novel in his treatment of the Joads—the kind of novels written the book and its context 11

by Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, or An American Tragedy), Steinbeck will not allow us to lose sight of our animality. and adapted by Richard Wright (Native Son), novels which But like John wresting prophecy from rotting flesh, Rose of begin badly and only get worse. Like those novels, The Grapes Sharon insists that this act is also a gesture governed by laws of Wrath accumulates power through a kind of literary of civility: she makes her family leave the barn so that she doggedness, the following of a plot or a destiny through every can have the privacy her customs demand. twist and turn to its last terrible end. But Carrie Meeber, Clyde John and the baby, Rose of Sharon and the old man: these Griffiths, and Bigger Thomas all have one tragic trait that mythic moments, the baby as a latter-day Moses, the defeated the Joads do not—their fates are in some essential way the girl as the mother in a Pieta, do not ask us to transcend our consequence of their actions. One is aghast at the end of these humanity. What makes these moments so moving, and not naturalist tragedies—aghast, but crying no tears. sentimental, is that they present the truth that our animal I suppose one could charge the ending of The Grapes of existence—corporeal corruption, mammalian nurture—can Wrath with being sentimental, but usually that description be, under conditions of cosmic distress and man-made applies to situations that offer consolations or rewards we savagery, the scene of degradation and repugnance, but that suspect are unearned. It is hard to see what that consolation that same animal existence is always the ground of our future, would be in Rose of Sharon offering her breast to the old our sustaining acts of vision and care. man. There is no likelihood this act of succor will make a big ______difference—he’ll probably die anyway, and Rose of Sharon will Jonathan Elmer is Professor of English at Indiana University, where continue to have breasts full of milk for a child that did not he currently serves as Chair of the department. He writes on American live. But such dour calculations seem unimportant here. The literature and culture, and has published on Jefferson, Poe, Melville, feeling of the moment is quite different: Rose of Sharon Wright, Lacan, Lecter, and Lebowski. He also plays trombone around “looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together town, most often with The Postmodern Jazz Quartet. ______and she smiled mysteriously.” We are meant to see the sacred in that mysterious smile; Rose of Sharon’s individual psychological state may provide reasons for smiling, but they are not especially relevant or interesting here. We have left her Hearing The Grapes of Wrath behind and ascended into a different dimension—the mythic. by George Hutchinson By mythic, I mean the kind of narrative that deals with essential metaphysical issues: origins and ends; humanity’s For almost a month this past summer I was unable to read or location with respect to seemingly immortal entities (the gods, write due to eye surgery, and I had to sit still with my face down perhaps the species); and the mortal or animal aspects of our all day. I survived on audiobooks, and The Grapes of Wrath was corporeal fate. This last set of issues is shockingly on display one of them. Over the course of three or four days, sitting in an in The Grapes of Wrath, and nowhere more so than the ending. armchair staring at the floor, I never tired of it. The pacing was Part of the horror and indignation we feel derives from how incomparable—it is one of the great “road novels”—the characters cruelly degraded these people become, how brutalized, in the unforgettable, the story powerful in its fundamental simplicity. specific sense of seeming reduced to their brute or animal Rather than feeling depressed by this relentlessly sad story and existence. Basic human acts—burying or otherwise disposing my own potentially depressing condition (not yet knowing if the of the dead by ceremonial means—are denied them, by natural operation would work, or the recovery succeed), I found myself disaster and by human cruelty. Told he cannot bury Rose of feeling hour after hour a profound gratitude. None of the other Sharon’s baby, Uncle John puts it in an apple box and sends novels I listened to this summer—and some are rated higher by it down the floodtide current. And yet this hopeless act of critics today as works of art—affected me as powerfully. disposal is converted into an act of communication, a warning The Grapes of Wrath, despite the vivid individuality of its or prophecy: “Go down an’ tell ‘em,” John says to the corpse. characters, is one of the few classic American novels (or works “Go down in the street an’ rot an’ tell ‘em that way.” A kind in any literary genre for that matter) that is about the collective— of degraded Moses in the bullrushes, the infant corpse not the “I,” not the “he” or “she,” but the “we.” Long after the nonetheless has as noble a prophetic role, bringing forth from collectivist ethos of the 1930s and early 1940s seems to have been the essence of its mortality—its corruptible flesh—an act banished from the American social imagination, one testament securing a future. So, too, with Rose of Sharon offering her to the power of Steinbeck’s tale is that (long though it be) it breast to the old man. A baby at the breast seems a normal—in continues to be taught in schools and colleges across the country some times and places, a sacred—fusion of what is mortal and and around the world. It has inspired great songwriters (Bob animal with what is immortal in our human condition. To feed Dylan, Bruce Springsteen), a great film adaptation, an opera, an old man, however, is a shocking offense against that sense and more recently a great play. of propriety and normalcy. In staging such a shocking scene, 12 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

The happiest moment in Steinbeck’s book—perhaps the Yet wrath is salvific in Steinbeck’s novel. When people grow only happy moment—occurs when the Joads settle in to the angry it is a sign that their spirit isn’t broken as they fend off the government-subsidized camp, Weedpatch. Here the people share more damaging state, despair. the work of maintaining the environment in which they live; they The productive wrath Steinbeck prizes is not an individual elect their leaders and rotate responsibilities. They help each anger; it’s a collective one. “Where a number of men gathered other out, and no one starves. Steinbeck presents it as a model together, the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place. democratic community, in which power is distributed rather And the women sighed in relief, for they knew it was all right— than concentrated in a few, and for just that reason feared by the the break had not come; and the break would never come as long great landowners, whose lackeys constantly threaten it. We as fear could turn to wrath.” Something akin to this scenario is mourn as we come to realize that the Joads will end up having to playing out today in many of the world’s geographies. No wonder, leave to find work. despite its occasional preachiness or dated assumptions about The enemies in Steinbeck’s book are the big banks and the gender, The Grapes of Wrath still speaks to us, and is today one of association of “big farmers,” who stand for the concentration of the most widely adapted and translated novels in all of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. The small farmers American literature. are choked out by debt, and even the middle class townspeople ______end up caught in the financial and political web that serves George Hutchinson is the Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary business conglomerates. The environment is degraded as the Studies in the Department of English at IU, and Adjunct Professor unregulated industries and banks bend everything to their will. of American Studies and African American and African Diaspora Only a broad collective response could be strong enough, in Studies. He has published several books, including The Harlem Steinbeck’s view, to change this inhuman calculus. That is the Renaissance in Black and White and In Search of Nella Larsen: lesson Tom Joad learns from Jim Casy, the preacher become A Biography of the Color Line, which won the Christian Gauss union organizer, and it infuses the entire book. Award of Phi Beta Kappa, among others. He is starting a book on American literature and culture in the 1940s. He is glad to have Steinbeck presents wondrous scientific and technical recovered from eye surgery and to be reading and writing again. advances as admirable but fundamentally futile. “Men who can ______graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits can be eaten.” (As I listened to this I could not help but think of the state of medical care in the United States today, Teaching The Grapes of Wrath because just before my operation I read the appeal on an internet Christoph Irmscher discussion site of a man in California who was going inexorably blind day by day because he had no health insurance and no One of the delights of teaching Grapes of Wrath, as I had money to pay for surgery.) The small farmers let their produce occasion to find out last year in an undergraduate survey rot because, squeezed by low prices determined by the great class, is that everything about it seems so transparent and canneries, they cannot afford to sell it. “There is a crime here,” yet most of it is not. Steinbeck seems to be telling a fairly the narrator says, “that goes far beyond denunciation.” The straightforward, linear story—of people unjustly being bitterest passage in the book is this: deprived of their homes and property and setting out, reluctantly, despondently, despairingly—to seek their fortune The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river somewhere else. And yet this simple quest, comparable, as [where the potatoes have been dumped because the farmers several of my students noticed, to the great epics of the past can’t afford to sell them], and the guards hold them back; such as the Odyssey, is complicated in a number of ways. they come in rattling cars to get dumped oranges, but the Most drastically, Steinbeck interrupts his narrative with kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the regular asides, so-called interchapters, which reflect on potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in more general, often political issues or introduce new a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of characters or plot elements that usually will not resurface oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of again: a turtle crossing a road, a gas station owner with a the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry paper hat, a one-eyed man working in a junkyard (a latter- there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the day Cyclops, to be sure). Even on the last page we encounter grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy new people, a starving man (who will be nursed by Rose of for the vintage. Sharon) and his son. Steinbeck is constantly challenging our expectation, renewed with each of the narrative chapters proper, that his story will unfold tidily and resolve itself the book and its context 13 neatly, a hope crashed again and again by new insertions, which Steinbeck’s words transcended the circumstances of the additions, and commentary. An attempt at a simple plot chart novel’s composition in 1939 and touched us, too. Take the on the blackboard had all of us scratching our heads. heartbreaking passage in which the narrator describes Ma’s Now take a look at Steinbeck’s protagonist, Tom Joad, face, her clean, calm beauty, her hazel eyes “which have seen featured in one of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl songs (which we very possible tragedy,” her body thick with work and child- listened to, of course). In many ways the moral center of the bearing, her delicate fingers that trace Tom’s cheek like a novel, Tom is an unrepentant killer with the instincts of a blind man would. Tom is so overwhelmed that be bites his lip predatory animal, elegant, fast, uncompromising. He will when his mother touches him. “She saw the little line of blood kill again, silently, before the novel has ended. More head- against his teeth and the trickle of blood down his lip. Then scratching. The Joads’ quest for a new life—or, put more she knew….” They exchanged not a word while this was simply—for work and food they can eat acquires a fantastic, happening, and yet so much was said. No one in the class who even surreal quality as they lose one family member after had read Steinbeck’s novel attentively that fall—and judging another, to death, to life, to missed opportunities, to from the lively discussions I’d venture the guess that almost cowardice. Almost ritualistically, the Joads are stripped also everyone did—will ever forget how Ma, before leaving the of their few remaining belongings until all they have left is house for the last time, takes out her box full of carefully their own bodies—and yet the novel ends with a smile, if a preserved mementoes: letters, photographs, earrings, a watch “mysterious” one. Now some of my students were actively chain braided of hair, a single cuff link, a clipping about Tom’s shaking their heads. Was Steinbeck mocking us? The ending murder trial. “For a long time she held the box, looking over it wasn’t “fruity,” he told his editor. But it sure looked like and her fingers disturbed the letters and then lined them up that to some of us. again.” This is the story of her life so far, told in documents Why all this confusion? Some of the questions that arose lined up so that it all makes sense. Keeping the trinkets (who we simply couldn’t answer. But we could agree on one thing: could afford, in these hard times, to leave behind a golden cuff Steinbeck takes his readers seriously. He gives them a simple link?), Ma puts the letters back and then quickly, shockingly, problem or conflict and then suggests complex or ambiguous burns the entire box in the stove. The record of a life gone up answers or no answers at all. This is his way of insuring the in flames. The tractors have deprived Ma of more than her dignity of his characters; the Joads deserve nothing less than a land. “The work was done.” difficult book. “I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves Note: Feel free to check out our class blog, which is publicly to rags,” Steinbeck said in 1939 when arguing with his agent accessible at http://environmentalfictions.blogspot.com. and editor about proposed changes to the manuscript. The For our discussions of Grapes of Wrath, click on “September” old and not very interesting question whether or not Steinbeck in the list on the right. was a Communist fades in view of other, more prominent ______concerns. Why, for example, asked my students, does Christoph Irmscher is a Professor of English at Indiana University Steinbeck at the end of the novel grant moral authority Bloomington, where he teaches things he likes. He is the author and agency and, yes, that “mysterious” smile to one of the of The Poetics of Natural History, Longfellow Redux, and most annoying characters in the novel, superficial, ditzy Public Poet, Private Man and has edited John James Audubon’s “Rosasharn,” who has shown remarkably little interest in Writings and Drawings for the Library of America. He was the suffering of others throughout the novel? And what are featured in a documentary, A Summer of Birds, released by we to make of the final conversation between Ma Joad and Louisiana Public Television last year. His new book, Mr. Agassiz’s Tom in the culvert, an encounter that hints at deeper, more Puzzle-Box, is coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ______elemental bonds between the two than even those of mother and son: “I wanta touch you again, Tom. It’s like I’m blind, it’s so dark.” Ultimately, for my students, the truth of Steinbeck’s novel rested perhaps less in the political charges he leveled against the rich and self-satisfied, against the capitalists and the Associated Farmers, less in his completely convincing argument that landownership needs to earned, by the sweat of one’s brow and the labor of one’s callused hands. For all of us in that crowded, often freezing classroom in Ballantine Hall, Steinbeck’s truth shone forth above all in those moments of supreme, shimmering authenticity that couldn’t have simply been invented by a writer at his desk, moments in section 2: Sustainablilty, Bloomington, and the World of The Grapes of Wrath

What Does Literature Have to Do with Sustainability? by Ellen MacKay

“the trees and the muscled mountains are the nineteenth century furthered this sensibility. Novelists like world — but not the world apart from man — the James Fenimore Cooper, essayists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, world and man — the one inseparable unit man poets like Emily Dickinson, naturalists like John James and his environment. Why they should ever have Audubon, and conservationists like John Muir all brought been understood as being separate I do not know.” renewed attention to the richness and the fragility of America’s natural beauty. Perhaps the most lasting legacy —John Steinbeck in a belongs to Henry David Thoreau, whose retreat to Walden journal entry from 1938. Pond in 1845 has provided generations of students with the first manifesto for off-the-grid, low-emissions living. Barry Lopez,the environmentalist writer, once said of John Thoreau’s philosophy remains remarkably timely: “Most of Steinbeck that he “brings together the human heart and the the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are land.” But in today’s world of pressing environmental not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the emergencies—the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the elevation of mankind.” Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the dwindling polar ice caps— In the twentieth century, several ecologically-focused Steinbeck’s sort of ecological consciousness might seem to books motored public policy. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, offer us little. We tend to think about sustainability as the which spurred Americans to better husbandry of their province of government policymakers, scientific researchers agricultural and human resources, is just one example. and maverick engineers, whose job is to do something to solve The most famous is surely Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller, an emerging crisis. The work of art, on the other hand, is Silent Spring, which brought national attention to the risks merely a representation, and as such it lacks the means to fix a of chemical pesticide use. leak, clean up a dumping ground, or reduce carbon emissions. As a Fisheries employee, Carson used her close ties to What is worse, the arts and humanities have often been government scientists to investigate the effects of synthetic understood as uninterested and uninformed about science and pesticides—particularly DDT, industry. In 1959 the scientist and author C. P. Snow delivered which was trumpeted in post a famous lecture on the increasing divide between literary World War II America as a thinkers and ‘men of science’; later published in book form key example of science as The Two Cultures, Snow’s lament for a world split between triumphing over a perilous dreamy intellectualism and scientific progress still informs the environment. Carson’s way we think about the differences between the disciplines. examination of the long-term The history of nature writing tells a different story, implications of chemical use— however. How we depict our environment has always impacted in particular, her investigation how we understand our natural resources and what we do to of the cancer-causing protect or abuse them. Romanticism, the artistic movement properties of compounds like dedicated to the elevation of nature and conventionally dieldrin and heptachlor— exemplified by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry, Rachel Carson in 1936, one of only revolutionized our under- Beethoven’s symphonies, and Turner’s paintings, is credited two women biologists at the US standing of chemical toxicity. Bureau of Fisheries. by many scholars for developing a green sensibility in Carson was the first to point England and beyond. Recent criticism has argued that the out that man-made molecules Romantic movement paved the way for all sorts of reappraisals tend to biomagnify as they move through the food chain— of humanity’s relation to its environment, from quantum that is, they persist in predatory species like fish, birds and physics to animal rights. Several American writers of the humans far longer than they do in insects or plants, where sustainablilty, bloomington, and the world of the grapes of wrath 15 they accumulate to a dangerous degree, causing all kinds of not only does the environment structure the way we make and unforeseen health effects. think about art, it is among the most important categories of Carson’s book was excerpted and serialized in the New literary and artistic thinking for the new century: Yorker and in Audubon magazine; it was also selected as the Book of the Month for October of 1962. As a result, her If, as W. E. B. DuBois famously remarked, the key warnings were read by a broad swath of the American problem of the twentieth century has been the problem population and produced a swift response. Hearings on of the color line, it is not at all unlikely that the pesticide use were called by Congress and eventually led to twenty-first century’s most pressing problem will be the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. the sustainability of earth’s environment—and that In the 1990s, the rise of ecocriticism, or literary criticism the responsibility for addressing this problem, or that takes into account the ecology of a given work, has made constellation of problems, will increasingly be seen attention to environmental issues a key component of literary as the responsibility of all the human sciences, not analysis. Authors from Chaucer to Wharton have come in for just of specialized disciplinary enclaves like ecology substantial reappraisal as a result. As Lawrence Buell writes, or law or public policy.

Nature Writing Now: An Interview with Scott Russell Sanders

One of Bloomington’s “Living Treasures” (a designation bestowed When you joined the IU faculty, did you anticipate the direction of your upon him by the Bloomington Area Arts Council), Scott Sanders career—that you would become known for writing about the environment? has gained international renown as the Midwest’s preeminent author and philosopher of our ecological “common wealth.” For his corpus I didn’t know what sort of books I would write or whether they of essays, fiction, and children’s literature he has won the Eugene would get published or how they might be received, but I was and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Lannan Literary already concerned about the deteriorating condition of Earth. Over Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the years, as the rate of damage has accelerated—to the land, rivers, the Great Lakes Book Award, the Kenyon Review Literary Award, oceans, and atmosphere, and to millions of our fellow species— the John Burroughs Essay Award, The Mark Twain Award, and the I have grown ever more alarmed. It’s clear that our way of life— Indiana Humanities Award, among many others. In this interview, especially in the high-consumption, industrialized world—is he discusses the meaning of sustainability and the natural and wreaking havoc on the planet and inflicting suffering on the poor cultural inspiration for his incredible body of work. everywhere. This awareness runs through everything I’ve written— short stories, to begin with, then novels, then essays and memoirs and documentary narratives.

What kinds of courses did you teach? During my 38 years of teaching at IU—I retired in 2009—I offered courses in 19th- and 20th-century American literature, in the American nature-writing tradition, and in creative writing. Some of my favorite courses were those I designed to explore a particular theme, such as community or equality or wildness. Literature is one of the richest means we have of understanding not only the perennial aspects of our existence—love and loss, discovery and death, hope and grief—but also the burning issues of a particular place and time.

What literary works/authors influenced you? I’ve been nourished by many writers. A short list would include Wordsworth, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Yeats, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Scott Sanders, IU Distinguished Professor and author, most recently, George Orwell, Loren Eiseley, James Baldwin, Italo Calvino, Jorge of A Conservationist Manifesto. Luis Borges, and the ancient Chinese poets. Among living writers, 16 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

I would mention Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, Jim Harrison, Alice Munro, Louise Erdrich, Terry Tempest Williams, Excerpt from Scott Russell and Barry Lopez. My older sister taught me to read when I was four Sanders, A Conservationist years old, and I have been reading ever since. Manifesto (Indiana University Press, 2009): 46-48 Did you consciously take up the call to bridge C. P. Snow’s “two cultures”? I love science as well as the arts and humanities, so I have never felt Down at the roots of there is any real conflict between one way of knowing and another. language, we often find an We invent disciplines such as sociology or biochemistry for our earthy wisdom.Take the own convenience, to suit our limited minds; but the universe word growth,for example. itself is undivided. Long before I thought of becoming a writer, When Donella Meadows I imagined becoming a scientist. I wanted to learn everything I and her colleagues could about how the universe evolved and how it works. Until the published a report in 1972 end of my junior year in college, I focused on math, physics, and on the prospects for the chemistry. But in my senior year, realizing that I wanted to become continued expansion of the human economy, they a writer, I switched to English. I continue to regard the scientific called their book The Limits account of the world as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. to Growth.The very title I draw on that knowledge in my writing frequently and gratefully. provoked outrage in many circles, because a prime What is your take on The Grapes of Wrath? Steinbeck’s article in the techno- environmentalism is so different from, say, Thoreau’s more iconic industrial creed is that nature writing. Whose sense of place speaks to you more profoundly? there are no limits to Thoreau was the greater writer and the deeper thinker, but growth. According to this Steinbeck speaks more directly to our own time and he shows a creed, any constraints wider sympathy for human beings. Steinbeck’s relevance to our imposed by nature will be overcome by time comes not only from the fact that he was writing a century technical ingenuity or the free market. Mining, later than Thoreau, and therefore used language in a way that is more accessible to contemporary readers, but also because in The Grapes of Wrath he recorded a phenomenon that even such a visionary as Thoreau could not have imagined—the displacement and conservancy areas all the more precious. I also love the of a vast population by an environmental catastrophe. Over two limestone country that surrounds Bloomington and Bedford, million people were uprooted by the Dust Bowl, which was caused the rolling hills above ground and the caves below. I love the big, by a prolonged drought on the Great Plains, land that should never lazy rivers, especially the Wabash and White and the mighty Ohio. have been plowed. Today, there are an estimated 50 million I love the clearly marked seasons, the grand thunderstorms, environmental refugees worldwide, driven from their homelands the armadas of clouds, lightning bugs, every manner of bird and by soil erosion, deforestation, the spreading of deserts, the butterfly and beast. drying up of rivers and aquifers, and the pressures of growing populations. I doubt that Steinbeck would have thought of himself You have done so much to bring an environmental consciousness to the as an “environmental” writer, even if that term had been current world of arts and letters. Which other mediums/other artists do you find in his day. More likely he thought of himself as a social writer, especially generative as you go about your own work? one especially attuned to outsiders, laborers, and the poor. I have followed the Nova and Nature programming on PBS for many What about the ecology/environment of Indiana has especially years, and have also been inspired by documentaries such as Planet inspired your work? Earth from the BBC and the Ken Burns series on our national parks. They suggest what a rich medium television can be. I’ve also I feel most at home in the hill country of southern Indiana, the been inspired by the tradition of American nature painting, from portion of the state that was never flattened or fertilized by glaciers. Thomas Cole to Georgia O’Keeffe, and by nature photographers Except in the bottomlands along streams, the soils here are such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. I’m fascinated by the work thin and the terrain is uneven, not much good for farming but of environmental artists such as Andy Goldsworthy. Closer to excellent for growing trees. I love the hardwood forests. Indiana home, I have been stirred by the work of Indiana musicians such as has the smallest percentage of public land of any state east of the Malcolm Dalglish, Carrie Newcomer, Tim Grimm, Krista Detor, Mississippi River, a fact that makes our protected forests, parks, sustainablilty, bloomington, and the world of the grapes of wrath 17

drilling, pumping, clearing, manufacturing, Nothing in nature expands forever. Certainly for canoes and shelters and fires; berries and and consuming—along with the human nothing on Earth grows unchecked, neither seeds; fruits and nuts; corn and beans and population that drives it all—will expand forever, bodies nor cities nor economies. Buried in the squash; lambs, calves, children, and chicks. In the boosters claim. Politicians and business word growth is the wisdom of people blessed traditional cultures, all these blessings were leaders speak of growth as unbounded and with outdoor understanding, people who surrounded by ceremonies of respect, for unambiguously good. watched the grass rise and fall each year like people who lived on the bounty of nature Our ancestors knew better. If we dig a green wave. understood the need to protect the source. down to the root of growth,we find a verb * In light of this wisdom, fish in the sea that means to turn green, as grass does in The word resource embodies a similar are only a resource so long as their breeding the spring. In fact, grow, grass,and green all insight. As we commonly use the word, it grounds are preserved and their numbers are rise from the same Indo-European stem. means “raw material,”something we burn for not decimated. Clean air and water renew Grass turns green in the spring, shoots up energy, pulp for paper, or mine for steel.We themselves only so long as we do not fill vigorously during the summer, then dies back speak of natural resources, human resources, them with poisons.Topsoil is a resource and lies fallow through the winter. Season financial resources, in each case referring to only so long as we do not sterilize it with after season, the wilted grass turns to humus, one kind of stuff that can be used to make chemicals or squander it to erosion. Coal, oil, enriching the soil. Molded into this word, other kinds of stuff. But the root meaning of iron ore, and the other materials we drill for therefore, is a recognition that growth is resource is to spring up again. Source and or mine are not resources at all, because they bounded, that it obeys the cycles of sun surge both derive from a verb meaning to cannot be replenished. Nor is money a and rain, that it generates more fertility than rise. A resource is something that rises anew, resource, because it brings nothing into the it uses up. like grass in a meadow or water in a spring. world, it merely divvies up what’s already If the phrase sustainable growth means In the world of hunters, gatherers, here.The wild abundance of the planet is perpetual expansion, then it is a delusion. herders, and planters, what bounty surges quickly being exhausted because we have Cancer shows that rampant growth soon forth time and again, year in and year out? seized on nature’s gifts without protecting becomes malignant.The sprawl of cities over The light and warmth of sun, the life-giving the springs from which they flow. the countryside and the spread of bellies over water of rain and snow, the ebb and flow of belts teach us that, beyond a certain point, tides; alewives and salmon returning to expansion leads to misery, if not disaster. spawn; migrating bison and caribou; trees

The Vocabulary of Denial The model that nature provides is not one of runoff flushed down the Mississippi River has perpetual growth, as in a capitalist economy, but of extinguished nearly all life in an area of the Gulf of In A Conservationist Manifesto, Scott Sanders perpetual regrowth. Up to a point, trees may be Mexico that ranges from 5,000 to 8,000 square miles. also exposes some of the doublespeak of our harvested from a forest, crops may be harvested More than a quarter of the world’s coral reefs have environmental commentators. from the fields, fish may be harvested from the sea, already been destroyed by pollution, sedimentation, and the regenerative power of nature will replace rising ocean temperatures, and the use of explosives “Sustainable Consumption” what has been taken away. If pushed far beyond that and cyanide for collecting tropical fish. To put a prettier face on our prodigal ways, point, however, forests give way to deserts, as in apologists for consumerism have recently borrowed North Africa; soils become sterile, as in much of the “Sinks” a key term from ecology and begun to speak of Middle East; and fish stocks collapse, as has hap- The so-called “sinks”—the air, soils, and waters— “sustainable growth” and “sustainable consumption.” pened recently to dozens of species, such as cod, that into which we have been dumping our wastes since In ecology, a process may be legitimately described were once a mainstay of the human diet. No form of the beginning of the industrial revolution are finite. as sustainable if it can continue indefinitely without consumption is sustainable, therefore, if it exceeds Their capacity to absorb and detoxify our waste is degrading or exhausting its biophysical sources. the capacity of a natural system to replenish itself. also finite, and for certain materials that capacity is Thus a prairie is sustainable because it requires only Thus it is nonsense to speak of sustainable effectively zero. There is no safe level for the dumping rain, snow, sunlight, and a substrate of minerals to consumption of materials that do not regenerate, of radioactive debris, for example, or for the dumping flourish over thousands of years. But there is no such as fossil fuels. Once oil, coal, or natural gas is of mercury, dioxins, PCBs, CFCs, and a slew of other such thing as sustainable growth, not even in a burned, it is gone. There is no regeneration of lead, industrial byproducts. Even relatively benign prairie, where plants die back every winter and iron, zinc, gold, copper, or any other metal crucial byproducts, such as the carbon dioxide released by eventually decay, increasing the fertility of the soil. to industry. Once a wilderness is cut up by roads, the burning of fossil fuels, become dangerous when In nature, no organism or community of organisms oil-drilling platforms, landing strips, and toxic they exceed certain limits. The dynamic equilibrium expands forever; all growth is constrained by dumps, it will never again be wilderness, at least not of the biosphere has been created and maintained predation, climate, geology, the availability of within many human generations. Once the top of a in part by biological activity, and it is the single most moisture and nutrients, and by other critical factors. mountain is stripped away to extract coal and the important factor in the continued flourishing of life Thus, even the grandest trees, such as redwoods, rubble is shoved into valleys below, the landscape on Earth. Any human activity that disturbs this grow only as high as sap can rise against the pull will be forever deformed. Rivers may eventually flow dynamic equilibrium, as by thinning the ozone layer of gravity; the size of insects is limited by the weight clear if they are protected from new sources or heating the atmosphere, is a threat not only to of their exoskeletons; and the bulk of birds is of pollution, but the pollution already dumped into humankind but to every other species. limited by the physics of flight. the ocean has nowhere else to go. Agricultural 18 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

Tom Roznowski, and Michael White, and by the wood sculptures as power of good ideas and worthy examples, and the human well as the novels of James Alexander Thom. imagination—to name a few. The potential in our species to produce a John Steinbeck, and through him to create The Grapes What gives you most concern as a conservationist? of Wrath, and through that novel to inspire a play, and through that play to arouse the conscience of theatre-goers today—all of Atop a long list of concerns I would place the disruption of Earth’s these are sources of hope. We are creatures capable of learning, climate, with all the consequent damage to plants and animals and changing, seeing things afresh. Balancing our tendencies toward people. Other pressing concerns include the looming shortage of selfishness, shortsightedness, and aggression are the capacities freshwater in many parts of the world, and the poisoning of soils, for compassion, vision, and cooperation. Across this land and rivers, and oceans in all parts of the world. Already, more than a around the world, there are countless people creating or preserving billion human beings lack safe drinking water. More than a ways of life that make for harmony with nature and for peace billion go to bed hungry every night. We have constructed a global and fairness and kindness among people. We can all join in that economy based on cheap oil and ever-expanding levels of work. In addition to being a writer and teacher, I am a father consumption, two conditions that cannot be sustained on a finite and grandfather; I am devoted to the service of hope. planet. As this global economy breaks down—a process that has ______already begun—and as the human population continues to grow, Born in Tennessee and reared in Ohio, Scott Sanders studied in more and more people will suffer for lack of basic necessities. Rhode Island and Cambridge, England, before going on to become a What I find equally disturbing is that so few people in America Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University. Among his bother to inform themselves about these and other challenges twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal to our well-being, or bother to work toward a saner and more nonfiction, including Hunting for Hope, A Private History of Awe, durable way of life. Our heedlessness will make life much harder and A Conservationist Manifesto. He and his wife, Ruth, a for those who come after us. biochemist, have lived since 1971 in Bloomington, where they reared two children. He is at work on a novel about the mending of a broken What gives you most hope? family, and a book of nonfiction about the meaning of wealth. Many things—the resilience of nature, the idealism and energy of young people, the legacy of art and science and literature, the

What Can Be Done?: Sustainability Then and Now

Cardinal asked four IU faculty who specialize in relevant fields earthquake in Haiti is a horrific example of a natural disaster about the legacy of the Dust Bowl and the current state of our ecology. that was amplified by societal failures in planning, preparation, Their answers are challenging and inspiring in equal measure. and response. Unfortunately, we’re likely to see more and ______more of these mega-disasters as more and more of the world’s population is concentrated in environmentally unsuitable Michael Hamburger areas. In a sense, our ability to construct human habitats that can withstand natural disasters is the ultimate test of the How does your research intersect with the Themester theme of sustainability of our civilization. “sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small Planet”? My own research—on earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and What would (or do) you tell students about the Dust Bowl in terms other natural disasters—is not so much on protection of of its preventability and the probability of its recurrence? the environment, but on protection from the environment. It’s hard to say whether the Dust Bowl represents a true In an era of increasing population, limited resources, and ‘natural disaster’. In fact, it represents an extraordinary mounting environmental challenges, there are more and more confluence of human-generated and natural conditions that people living in environmentally hazardous areas—and thus coincided to produce a devastating and persistent human and increasing potential for human impacts of natural disasters. environmental disaster. The most important lesson, I think, What’s worse, our unsustainable habits are exacerbating the is the need to recognize the potential for environmental vulnerability to natural disasters. This year’s devastating sustainablilty, bloomington, and the world of the grapes of wrath 19

change—and to find ways to steward our precious resources risk, vulnerability and adaptation of key economic sectors, and in such a way that they (and we) can withstand environmental tools for reducing climate forcing (mitigation). challenges. As an example of the first I edited a book, Pryor S.C.: Understanding Climate Change: Climate Variability, Predictability Here in Indiana, what environmental or ecological changes and Change in the Midwestern USA (Indiana University Press, concern you most? 2009). The book is a comprehensive assessment of change over Our continued reliance on fossil fuels for electricity and last 100 years and of projections for the 21st century. It is a transportation, and our stubborn refusal to invest in product of the MAGIC consortium (Midwest Assessment Group alternative technologies. for Investigations of Climate) and comprises 24 chapters with 33 contributing authors from 13 Midwestern institutions. What do you think best exemplifies smart sustainability in action? As an example of the adaptation/vulnerability research I am under contract by the International Atomic Energy Authority Sustainability in action relies on an unusual mixture of both for research on the Vulnerability of Energy Systems to Climate global and local actions. I like to think of the sustainable Change and Extreme Events. I think there is a book planned by citizen as someone who always keeps his ‘eye on the prize’— IAEA focusing on this work. focusing his or her efforts on the solutions to the big As an example of the mitigation research I am a contributing challenges facing our civilization. We need to keep in mind author for the IPCC special report on the role of renewables in the ‘big picture’ of humans’ place on the planet, while applying climate change mitigation. The report is forthcoming —IPCC these strategies in a very local and personal way. Thus, ‘smart Report: Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate sustainability’ might involve learning about new technologies Change Mitigation (SRREN) (Chapter: ‘Wind Energy’). I also to combat the environmental effects of the Gulf oil spill, while conduct research pertinent to the wind energy industry and at the same time making an extra effort to ride your bike to specifically on designing and operating wind farms to optimally school or work to demonstrate your personal commitment to harness the power of the wind. reducing our demand on environmentally unsustainable oil production. Or it might involve working with the Peace Corps What would (or do) you tell students about the Dust Bowl in terms to help solve water resource crises in sub-Saharan Africa, of its preventability and the probability of its recurrence? while at the same time remembering to turn off the water Climate variability is inherent – so climate WILL always vary when brushing your teeth here at home. We can’t solve the even in the absence of human activity. However, there are strong problems of the world unless we start at home! ______feedbacks between the way we use land and the atmospheric conditions. So we can enact measures to either amplify or Michael Hamburger has been a professor of Geological Sciences at ameliorate that variability. Indiana University since 1986. His research interests focus on the relation of earthquakes to global geological processes, earthquake hazards, and volcanic activity. He teaches a number of popular Here in Indiana, what environmental or ecological changes introductory-level courses, including “Earthquakes and Volcanoes” concern you most? and an ‘expedition’ course, “Volcanoes of the Eastern Sierra Recently I wrote a short book chapter with one of my graduate Nevada.” Professor Hamburger has also served as co-chair of the students on Indiana’s air quality. We analyzed data and found that IU Task Force on Campus Sustainability, which has led to a major in over half of the counties in which we measured air pollutants campus initiative that links academic, operational, and our samples exceeded federal standards. This is exacting a dreadful residential programs related to environmental stewardship. toll on our health. We as a state have also been very slow to embrace climate change mitigation and adaptation, though I am proud to say Indiana now has 1 gigawatt of installed wind capacity – this places us 9th in the USA for wind generation potential. Sara Pryor How does your research intersect with the Themester theme of What do you think best exemplifies smart sustainability in action? “sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small Planet”? Wind energy! As you probably know, energy use releases 2/3 of I work in three key areas: climate change science, adaptation the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, so if we want to stop global and change mitigation. With respect to the former the focus of warming we MUST change the way we generate electricity. To my work is making better projections of regional climates and give you some sense, a wind turbine will pay back the total energy understanding uncertainty in climate projections. I also work on 20 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath used in construction is about 6 months of use, and is built to upper Midwest will be key to reducing these risks, including run for 20 years — so we get 19.5 years of CO2 free electricity from conservation tillage, fallow cycles for heavily-used agricultural each turbine. soils, and other strategies. ______Sara is originally British and joined the IU faculty in 1995 after a Here in Indiana, what environmental or ecological changes Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. In concern you most? addition to her position at IU as Provost Professor of Atmospheric Science, Sara is also a visiting distinguished Professor at the The timing of precipitation events and other changes to University of Aarhus in Denmark, and a visiting senior scientist at the hydrological cycle are among the biggest risks. I am the Risø National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Denmark. especially concerned about increased flooding risks in the upper Midwest including parts of Indiana, though the biggest problems are likely to be in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, and to a lesser extent, the Ohio River Basin. One serious problem for us to consider – and adjust to – are Matthew R. Auer prospects for increased wintertime and early spring rainfall How does your research intersect with the Themester theme of (as predicted by climate change models). Flood risks will “sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small Planet”? be especially high during these periods. Meanwhile, we may be approaching an era of relatively hot summers, particularly My research has three or four prongs that deal with late in the summer – creating challenges for both rural and sustain•ability. First, I am interested in how foreign aid urban areas. Innovations in irrigation, drought-resistant from the US and other countries affects the abilities of crops, urban development that makes maximum use of shade aid recipients to promote sustainable development. For trees, and many other strategies will need to be developed example, I have considered how foreign aid and foreign direct and deployed. investment have shaped the fortunes of Equatorial Guinea in the article, “More Aid, Better Institutions, or Both?” What do you think best exemplifies smart sustainability in action? Sustainability Science 2007: 179-187. Second, I am interested in international forestry issues, including how international Cities that are forgoing building conventional transportation diplomacy does or does not promote sustainable forest infrastructure (new roads and freeways for passenger cars) management practices, globally. Third, I do research on how in favor of public transportation (e.g., light rail) are likely to public policy concepts – particularly the “policy sciences” have an advantage going forward, measured by air quality, school of public policy can improve our ability to diagnose water quality, efficient use of energy, indicators of morbidity, and address barriers to sustainability. Fourth, I am interested and property values. Smart sustainability is also likely to come in professional environmental education and the growth of to communities that are progressive about what they grow and undergraduate and graduate environmental and sustainability buy to eat. The healthiest, happiest communities are likely to curricula in the US. be the ones growing, purchasing, and eating foods that are comparatively lowest on the food chain. What would (or do) you tell students about the Dust Bowl in terms ______of its preventability and the probability of its recurrence? Matthew Auer became Dean of the Hutton Honors College at Indiana University Bloomington in 2008 after serving as Director Unfortunately, Dust Bowl conditions could happen again if of Undergraduate Programs at IUB’s School of Public and we are not careful. Back in the 1930s, aggressive row crop Environmental Affairs. Dr. Auer has published more than 50 peer- agriculture, particularly, planting and harvesting of wheat, reviewed articles and book chapters in the arenas of environmental combined with changes in oceanic temperatures and alter- policy, energy policy, sustainable development, and foreign aid. ation of the jet stream, led to the Dust Bowl. We could suffer In 2004, he published the edited volume, Restoring Cursed Earth: something comparable, particularly with inevitable climate Appraising Environmental Policy Reforms in Eastern Europe change. Drier summers are a strong possibility in much of and Russia (Rowman & Littlefield Press) which was nominated the region where the Dust Bowl was most fierce, e.g., Kansas, for the International Studies Association’s Sprout Award for best Oklahoma and Texas. As soils dry out, expect more topsoil to book in global environmental studies. He has taught at Indiana blow away in windstorms. Climate change models also predict University since 1996 where he has earned more than ten teaching increased incidences of heavy rainfall events, including in awards, including the President’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Auer served as Senior Adviser to U.S. Forest Service from 2001 winter months when crop fields are bare – worsening topsoil to 2006. He was a member of the U.S. delegation to the United erosion. Careful management of soils in the Great Plains and Nations Forum on Forests and to the International Tropical Timber Council. For more than twenty years, he has developed, sustainablilty, bloomington, and the world of the grapes of wrath 21 implemented, and evaluated energy and environmental aid evacuations). What is key is to understand which areas are programs for foreign governments and for the United States most vulnerable to different kinds of events and to try to build Agency for International Development in, among other countries, the social and environmental infrastructure necessary to Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, help societies cope with potential events. Estonia, Poland, Azerbaijan, and Thailand. Dr. Auer received a Ph.D. in Forestry and Environmental Here in Indiana, what environmental or ecological changes Studies from Yale University in 1996. He received an M.Phil and concern you most? M.S. from Yale in 2002 and 2003. Prior degrees include a Master of Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Compared to many parts of the world, Indiana doesn’t face too Diplomacy, Tufts University and an A.B. magna cum laude in many calamitous environmental changes. There are certainly Biological Anthropology from Harvard University in 1988. some events that may result in substantial environmental change such as the development of I-69, or a continued emphasis on ethanol production which affects agricultural land use in Indiana. But compared to events like sea level rise Tom Evans in Bangladesh, or droughts in semi-arid Africa, or even urban growth in Phoenix/Atlanta/Shanghai—the environmental How does your research intersect with the Themester theme of problems here kind of pale in comparison. That doesn’t mean “sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small Planet”? that we should let our guard down here. There are some My work focuses on interactions between people and the things that do concern me such as the reliance on coal for environment. This can consist of how human activities affect energy production in the Midwest as just one example. environmental resources (e.g. deforestation or reforestation) But a big challenge is that many of the environmental and how environmental processes affect human livelihoods processes affecting Indiana are “slow” processes that are (e.g. climate variability and food security). A core concept more difficult to detect over short periods of time (e.g. a with sustainability is understanding the complex interactions gradual degradation in air quality over 10 years vs. a sudden between people and the environment, and particularly the event like Hurricane Katrina). It’s simply more difficult to feedbacks in those interactions that result in tipping points change behavior when people don’t personally perceive a in systems. For example, in the semi-arid tropics there is a particular environmental change. fine line between sufficient agricultural production to sustain human livelihoods and the point where widespread famine What do you think best exemplifies smart sustainability in action? occurs. I study how people make land use decisions in Well, I’m not too sure what smart sustainability is! But any different conditions to understand where those tipping points dialogue about sustainability should emphasize the role of are in agricultural and forest systems. I’m just ramping up a both social and ecological processes, and in most cases project looking at the resilience of smallholders in rural acknowledge how global linkages affect local communities. Zambia to climate variability, particularly precipitation Another point to emphasize is that there is an important variability. We’re trying to understand how the portfolio of difference between conservation and sustainability. land holdings of a household, or the portfolio of land holdings Conservation practices like reducing water usage are often of households in a community can help make that household important, but conservation just for the sake of conservation or community more resilient to drought and flooding. does not necessarily lead to sustainability. We have to understand the point at which our resource use may not be What would (or do) you tell students about the Dust Bowl in terms sustainable and understand the implications of short term of its preventability and the probability of its recurrence? unsustainable resource use (e.g. fossil fuels) as a transition or bridge to a more sustainable pattern. I don’t work in that part of the US and will defer to ______climatologists working there to answer this complicated Tom Evans is an associate professor in the Department of question. But what I can say is that dustbowl type events are Geography and Director of the Center for the Study of Institutions, happening all over the world and it’s important to understand Population and Environmental Change (CIPEC). His work focuses the social and ecological conditions that can allow societies on interactions between people and the environment with an to be resilient to these kind of events. Trying to predict these emphasis on forest and agricultural dynamics in South America, events is incredibly complicated and there is a great danger Southern Africa and the Midwest United States. in ‘predicting’ such an outcome and having it not arise because people can become complacent when faced with a string of disaster predictions that don’t arise (e.g. with hurricane 22 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

Primary Access: The 1930s in Our Midst

Thomas Hart Benton, the Indiana influenced by Synchromism, the artistic movement that attempted to translate the power of sound into a visual register, Murals, and The Grapes of Wrath Benton left Europe and headed back to the US in 1913. He soon by Ellen MacKay was working for the War Department, providing documentary portraits of the war ships in American harbors. “all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me After the First World War, Benton turned his back on the while I was milking a cow” high modernist approach of European painting and declared —Grant Wood, American himself reborn as a Regionalist. Along with fellow Midwesterners regionalist painter. Grant Wood (who painted the famous pitchfork-holding farm couple called American Gothic) and John Steuart Curry, he Born in 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton was became a leading proponent of a distinctively American artistic the son of a populist congressman and named after a senator style that would be accessible and relevant to the whole popula- uncle. Politics were to be his destiny from before he could walk, tion. Benton’s reputation was clinched when he was selected to but Benton preferred to express his social views in art. After paint Indiana’s contribution to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair attending the Art Institute of Chicago from 1907 to 1909, Benton (also known as the Century of Progress World Exhibition). His headed to Paris to develop his talent, where he met a number of hall of murals, which included 22 separate industrial and cultural emerging artists, including fellow muralist Diego Rivera. Deeply scenes spanning 3,000 years, was both astonishing in scope and size and highly controversial; Benton didn’t shrink from some of the darker spots in Indiana’s history, including a scene of Klansmen in full regalia. Such was the acclaim and notoriety of his effort that in 1934, Benton’s self-portrait graced the cover of Time Magazine. Several years after the exhibition, the murals were acquired by IU Chancellor Herbert B Wells to be installed on permanent exhibit on the Bloomington campus; they now hang in the Auditorium, the attached University Theatre, and Woodburn Hall where they can be visited, free of charge, by any interested party. As definitive examples of American regionalism on a monumental scale, they are well worth a good look. Benton’s fiercely local and strongly political representa- tions of American life made him a natural choice as the illustrator for a high-end edition of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. There is a certain irony to the fact that this 1940 version was published by The Limited The Farmer Up and Down: Industrial Panel 8 in Benton’s series. Here is Frontispiece, The Grapes of Wrath, what IU curator Nan Brewer writes of the image: “While the picturesque, Editions Club for an elite illustration by Thomas Hart Benton. rural homestead still served as a symbol of the resilient Hoosier spirit to the audience of wealthy book nation (particularly during the years of World War I), the number of actual collectors—the motto on the farmers slipped from sixty-six percent of the male workforce in 1850 to thirty- one percent in 1920. Although he stands as one of the three largest figures second volume of “We Are the People” hardly seems along the length of the state’s “industrial” history,” Benton’s solitary farmer appropriate—but the lithographs are compelling, and marks the state’s shifting economic focus from the land to manufacturing.” demonstrate a clear affinity between Benton’s vivid and By the 1930s, in the throes of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, family farms would disappear from the American landscape in record numbers— homespun style and Steinbeck’s literary voice. something Benton seems to foreshadow in the looming clouds overhead. sustainablilty, bloomington, and the world of the grapes of wrath 23

The Joads Depart Oklahoma, The Grapes of Wrath, illustration by Thomas Hart Benton. “Tom leapt silently,” The Grapes of Wrath, illustration by Thomas Hart Benton.

Benton’s Regionalist style is now all but indissociable Economically, environmentally, and ethically, the 1930s were a from the way Americans think about the 1930s. Like Steinbeck’s crossroads for America, and a period in which art did much to Ma Joad or Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” his larger-than life move the people to a new assessment of its human and material figures may be afflicted but they are always thrumming with resources. Sometimes cheekily, sometimes polemically, Benton’s energy and powerfully built. They radiate eventual triumph over work mustered support for that effort. How fortunate we are to adversity in their dynamic, muscular poses. In this respect, the have his most important work—and the largest mural cycle in the art of Thomas Hart Benton remains an optimistic memorial of world—here in our midst. a period that was struggling with its unsustainability.

The Farm Security Administration of the 20th century’s most famous photographers to work to document the farming conditions of the Depression and to cap- Photographs: A Treasure of the ture the improvements brought by New Deal legislation. Among IU Art Museum these were Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange (whose “Migrant A conversation with Nan Brewer Mother” we looked at earlier), Rusell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and John Vachon. Though we seldom think about it, most of the works held at a IU’s first photography professor, Henry Holmes Smith, museum are not on exhibit. The IU Art Museum, recognized as acquired his vast collection of these photographs by befriending one of the 10 best university-based museums in the country, Roy Stryker, the head of the photography unit of the FSA, and possesses remarkable collections that students and visitors are convincing him of the necessity of furnishing his students with free to explore, even when they are not on display (the IU Art examples of this new and largely unheralded art (Smith was one Museum website explains how these materials can be accessed; of the first professors of photography in the country). During his see http://www.iub.edu/~iuam/section.php?returnSection= years as a faculty member, Smith mounted a series of exhibitions access%5Fcollections&navSection=printroom ). One such highlighting the collection’s holdings. More recently, Nan collection is the Henry Holmes Smith photo archive, a group of Brewer, the Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of works on paper at over 800 photographs produced by some 30 photographers the IU Art Museum, assembled an online exhibit of a selection of under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, the U.S. the FSA photographs. Entitled “The People’s America: Selections Forest Service, and the Soil Conservation Corps, among other from the Henry Holmes Smith Archive,” the exhibit can be found agencies and institutions. The first of these, the FSA, was at http://www.iub.edu/~iuam/online_modules/fsa/ fsa.html responsible for the migrant labor camps that Steinbeck wrote (you can also easily find it on the museum’s homepage by about; as the chief agricultural arm of the New Deal, it sent some clicking “the collections” and then “online collections”). It 24 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath offers a quick and compelling overview of some of the riches in most difficult of times. The title visible on the last page of the the Holmes collection. songbook, “Sow Good Deeds,” suggests the moral message Cardinal asked Brewer to describe a couple of her favorite underlying many of the FSA photographs—that Americans should images in the archive. Here are her thoughts: come together to help out their less fortunate neighbors.

Figure 1: I find the stark Figure 3: I find myself particularly drawn to interior scenes, such simplicity of this image as this one by Russell Lee, which allow me to have an intimate by Walker Evans both glimpse into another time and place. Shot in almost every region disconcerting and of the country, FSA photographs also exposed Depression-era deeply moving. The Americans to ways of life that they would never have otherwise subject matter is encountered. This image opens the door and allows the viewer traditional and straight- forward: a bust-length portrait of a woman. Allie Mae Burroughs is shown in the center of the composition against an unadorned plank wall. While the weathered roughness of Figure 1: Walker Evans (American, the building gives some 1903–1975). Allie Mae Burroughs, wife indication of her rural of a cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama, summer 1936. Gelatin silver environment, there print. Henry Holmes Smith Archive, IU aren’t enough details Art Museum 200.X.12.8 to suggest a specific setting or locale. Figure 3: Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986). Negro revival meeting, La Forge, What elevates this image beyond a documentary record is the Missouri, August 1938. Henry Holmes Smith, IU Art Museum 200.XX.1.4 photographer’s sensitivity to the humanity of his subject. By drawing our attention to Allie Mae’s face, Evans encourages us to to witness a revival meeting of a black congregation from the feel the worry in her furrowed brow and the determination in perspective of a participant. The period’s strict segregation laws her pursed lips. With her enigmatic smile and knowing eyes, would have generally prohibited such close contact between Evans’s Depression-era Mona Lisa parallels the text in James the races. By presenting minorities with honesty and dignity, Agee’s classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. the FSA photographers helped to demystify the “other” and to encourage mutual understanding. Although perhaps Figure 2: I’ve always loved Russell Lee’s image of the three coincidental, the world map on the left-hand side, cropped to women singing. Little documentary details—such as the missing Africa, and the portrait of George Washington on the right temple on the center woman’s glasses—add a wonderful touch of suggest the historic struggle of African Americans for equality humor and authenticity to the scene. The similarities in the and political power, while the “rainbow colors” on the women’s faces, cloth- blackboard evoke the promise of racial harmony. ing, and hairstyles ______remind me of old pic- Nan Brewer is the Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper at tures of my grandmoth- the Indiana University Art Museum, where she has worked since 1986. er and her sister, as well In addition to overseeing the care and research of the museum’s as of the ladies in Grant collection of over 13,000 prints, drawings, and photographs, she has organized dozens of exhibitions and contributed to numerous Wood’s Daughters of publications on a wide variety of subjects, including several projects Revolution. Singing involving Depression-era prints and photography. In 1989, she together from a shared co-curated the first exhibition and catalogue devoted to the museum’s (and much worn) hymn holding of eighty-eight preparatory drawings for Thomas Hart Benton’s Figure 1: Russell Lee (American, 1903- book, the women also Indiana Murals, produced for the Indiana Pavilion at Chicago’s 1933 1986). Three members of ladies quintette at capture a sense of the “Century of Progress” Exposition and now housed on the Bloomington community sing, Pie Town, New Mexico, June enduring American campus. She is co-author of the publication Thomas Hart Benton 1940. Gelatin silver print. Henry Holmes Smith Archive, IU Art Museum 200.XX.1.238 spirit found even in the and the Indiana Murals, published by Indiana University Press. sustainablilty, bloomington, and the world of the grapes of wrath 25

“The Toto Picture”: Other highlights of the exhibit include autograph letters by Steinbeck and a first edition of The Grapes of Wrath that was Writers on Sustainability once owned by Steinbeck’s friend, the author and ex-Socialist An exhibit at the Lilly Library, September 1 to 30 Max Eastman. In addition, visitors will be able to see the 1940 Curated by Christoph Irmscher; limited, illustrated edition of The Grapes of Wrath. Designed by George Macy, the two quarto volumes contain 67 original by Christoph Irmscher two-color lithographs made on zinc plates by Thomas Hart Benton, no stranger to Hoosiers. The attractive and unusual From 1 to 30 September, the display cases in the Slocum binding uses rawhide for the spines and decorated grass cloth Room at the Lilly Library will feature selected items (books, for the boards, certainly an expensive choice during the manuscripts, photographs) from the collections of the Lilly Great Depression, which the publisher anxiously justified as that reflect an interest in ecology and sustainability. Objects calculated “to give the prospective reader an emotional on display will range from a first edition of Ernst Haeckel’s sympathy for the novel before he begins to read it.” The reader Generelle Morphologie (1866), in which Haeckel coined the term was supposed to imagine the “parched, sun-baked grass of “ecology,” to the first edition of Rachel Carson’s landmark the Dust Bowl” as well as the hides of Oklahoma steers. Was Silent Spring (1962). Henry David Thoreau, the ur-father of all this a defiant assertion of the value of art in difficult times things ecological, is represented with a letter in which he or sheer cynicism? As one of my students, Ryann Ward, encourages his correspondent to leave his gun at home when rephrased the paradox, “The binding is a luxury but it is going for a hike. intended to put the reader in the mindset of the destitute.” In celebration of Cardinal Stage’s production of The Grapes In a way, this is a good summary, too, of Steinbeck’s of Wrath, materials related to Steinbeck and his most famous impossible yet oh-so-necessary project, which renders artful novel will form the centerpiece of the exhibit. Like Carson’s what is in fact human wretchedness, a project in which we Silent Spring, Steinbeck’s novel, with its relentless depiction of participate every time we read or re-read the novel and human suffering, has influenced our understanding of poverty shudder at the sheer awfulness of the Joads’ existence. and environmental crisis to this day. The ravaged landscapes Steinbeck thought that the Pacific tide pools he of Oklahoma and the rotting fruits of California, destroyed by investigated with Ricketts were a beautiful metaphor for their growers rather than distributed among the needy, linger human life, too. They were fabulous places, he said in his long in the reader’s memory. But Steinbeck’s deep commit- novel Cannery Row (1945), wave-churned, creamy with foam, ment to ecological thinking is perhaps less familiar to readers whipped into frenzy “by the combers that roll in from the today than his political activism, which is why the exhibit whistling buoy on the reef.” When the tide went out again, focuses primarily on the novelist’s relationship with the however, everything became quiet and lovely. “The sea is visionary marine biologist Ed Ricketts, a cult figure among very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, environmentalists today. fighting, feeding, breeding animals.” Ricketts, who had taught Steinbeck had met Ricketts, the owner of Pacific Steinbeck to see clearly and to describe carefully, had his own Biological Laboratory in Monterey, in 1930. Nine years later, metaphor for what he wanted to achieve in his science: the when the full weight of the controversy surrounding Grapes “toto picture,” a view of life that emphasizes the relationships came crashing down on Steinbeck, he was in fact spending between organisms, the web of life (as Carson termed it, who more and more time at Ricketts’s laboratory. In March 1940, like all subsequent ecologists was indebted to Ricketts), and Ricketts and he embarked on a collecting expedition in the the sustainability of the whole. Steinbeck, his eager disciple, Gulf of California, the results of which (over 500 marine soaked up Ricketts’s words and enthusiastically described species, many of which were new to science) were published in what happens when one has learned to take the “toto” view. 1941 in a co-authored book deliberately modeled to resemble In a passage from Sea of Cortez that might serve to explain the Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Titled Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely strange, visionary ending of The Grapes of Wrath too, Steinbeck Journal of Travel and Research, the volume sold poorly and was wrote, “A man looking at reality brings his own limitations to later reprinted in a version that contained only Steinbeck’s the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool narrative minus the scientific appendix provided by Ricketts. stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space The Lilly exhibit will feature the original first edition of Sea of into the universe and fights out of the moment into non- Cortez, the galley proofs for Steinbeck’s affectionate portrait of conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.” Ricketts, written after the latter’s tragic death in 1948, as well as a privately printed edition of Steinbeck’s foreword to a new edition Ricketts’s now famous work, Between the Pacific Tides. section 3: The Theatrical Event of The Grapes of Wrath

How Did The Grapes of Wrath Become a Play? by Ellen MacKay

John Steinbeck was a playwright of no small order. Of Mice at Northwestern University, Galati had already been and Men, his second entry in his Dust Bowl trilogy, was written nominated for an Oscar for his adapted screenplay of as a play-novelette and produced to great acclaim on the The Accidental Tourist. Broadway stage (it won the 1937-8 New York Drama Critics’ The choice of Grapes was not an easy sell. As Frank Rich Circle Award). The Moon Is Down (a patriotic war play from wrote in his New York Times review of the production, “On the 1942) and Burning Bright (a family parable written in 1950) surface, The Grapes of Wrath is one of the worst great novels are less well known but impressive examples of his skill as a ever written. The characters are perishable W.P.A.-mural playwright. Since Steinbeck has such a developed dramatic archetypes incapable of introspection, the dialogue is at times style, the task of adapting The Grapes of Wrath for the stage had cloyingly folksy and the drama is scant. In any ordinary sense, long been considered especially daunting. Nevertheless, in there’s no ‘’play’’ here.” In the heyday of the mega-musical— 1988, the Chicago theatre company Steppenwolf decided to the late 80s were the time of Phantom of the Opera, bring the epic novel to the stage. The production, under the Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon the spareness of Galati’s earthy helm of Frank Galati (the adaptor and director), became one production was especially risky. But again, as Rich wrote, of the landmark theatre events of the 1980s. It toured La Jolla, the risks paid off: “What one finds in place of conventional California and London’s National Theatre, and in 1989, the dramatic elements - and in place of the documentary show opened at the Cort Theatre on Broadway. photography possible only on film - is pure theater as Steppenwolf already had secured its reputation as an up executed by a company and director that could not be more and coming theatre company. Founded by four recent high temperamentally suited to their task. As Steppenwolf school graduates in 1974—Rick Argosh, Leslie Wilson, Terry demonstrated in True West, Orphans and Balm in Gilead — Kinney, and Gary all titles that could serve for The Grapes of Wrath — it is an Sinise—Steppenwolf ensemble that believes in what Steinbeck does: the power of was an ensemble brawny, visceral art, the importance of community, the dedicated to the existence of an indigenous American spirit that resides in collective exploration inarticulate ordinary people, the spiritual resonance of of (largely) American American music and the heroism of the righteous outlaw… twentieth century Elegance may seem an odd word to apply to The Grapes of drama. By 1985, the Wrath, but it fits this one. While a stage production cannot company had received compete with the photography of Walker Evans or Pare the Tony Award for Lorentz, it can emulate the rigorous, more abstract painterly Regional Theatre imagery of Edward Hopper or Thomas Hart Benton or Excellence. The next Georgia O’Keeffe.” year, Galati joined the Rich’s account of the production’s success highlights the company and set about influence of 1930s art and music on Galati’s vision. For looking for a work Cardinal’s artistic director, Randy White, the art of Thomas to adapt. An actor, Hart Benton, the photography of Evans and Dorothea Lange, writer and professor and in particular, the music of Woody Guthrie have likewise of Performance Studies been important influences.

Lois Smith as Ma Joad and Gary Sinise as Tom Joad in the Steppenwolf Production of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). the theatrical event of the grapes of wrath 27

The Sound of The Grapes of Wrath

Another Approach to The Dust Bowl: Deal administration, a whole new generation of writers, painters, filmmakers, photographers, playwrights, actors, and dancers Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads, sought to update and advance the social value of their craft. A lot of and the Art and Science of Migratin’ their work had socialist leanings and remained committed to the principles of documentary realism, but even the most politically- by Ed Comentale charged artists—John Dos Passos, Dorothea Lange, James Agee, Richard Wright—recognized the need for other approaches and found themselves trying out more avant-garde modes and techniques.1 What was perhaps most thrilling about all their work, though, was that it was focused squarely on the everyday world— factories and railroad cars and roadside diners—and suddenly art, in the form of films, photographs, murals, and radio broadcasts, seemed a vital part of everyday life again. Woody Guthrie was certainly representative of this new group of artists, but his Dust Bowl background and his wily folk- philosopher image has earned him a unique place in the national imagination. Guthrie came of age amidst the Boom and Bust cycles of the Oklahoma plains; his family rose to prominence in the small oil town of Okemah and quickly followed the city’s decline in the 1920s, his father losing all his property and his mother institutionalized for insanity. But it wasn’t until a down-and-out Guthrie set out west to California in the mid-1930s that he began to craft a more recognizable artistic identity, along with a more compelling brand of American populist politics. Simply put, once on the road, Guthrie turned migration into an art form. His experience drifting across state lines from one work camp or railroad shelter to another allowed him to see rambling itself as a significant source of both community and creation. As traced out in his autobiography, Bound for Glory, Guthrie’s journey westward freed him from the pretentions of the American middle class, Woody Guthrie Performing. An undated photo from the Guthrie archive stripping him of his rights, his property, and even his sense of (http://www.woodyguthrie.org) selfhood.2 For this itinerant songster, though, the experience was both liberating and expansive, giving him access to another version of the American dream; as he explained, “I had a crazy notion in How can a work of art help a nation deal with calamity, whether it me that I wanted to stay down and out for a good long spell, so’s be war, natural disaster, economic depression, or mass poverty? I could get to live with every different kind of a person I could, to How should poets or painters depict the crises of their time and learn about all kinds of jobs they do, and to live with them for a provide some sense of purpose for their contemporaries? Should 3 long enough time to find out it was time to move on.” an artist stick with a strictly realist approach, clear-eyed and It was, of course, through rambling that Guthrie cultivated a impartial, so that at least the names and dates are correct for the great sympathy for those down-and-out migrants whose lives had history books? Or should an artist take a mythic approach, been destroyed by the drought, and he came to see himself as connecting the tragic details of the present to the heroic narratives spokesperson for a counter-public of impoverished, but ultimately and epic passions of the past? Maybe the artist needs a more mobile and motivated, Americans. But rambling also transformed subtle approach—surrealist or cubist, perhaps—a more radical art Guthrie’s understanding of music and its social value. If Woody to capture the confusion and horror of the moment? Guthrie was a socialist, it was mostly because he lived by the labor These questions are at least as old as Homer’s Iliad and as of his song and he believed music was a national resource akin to contemporary as Dave Egger’s Zeitoun, but they were particularly coal, steam, or oil. He confronted the events of his troubled era— pressing during the 1930s, when artists across the nation found from the Dust Bowl to the Depression to World War II and the themselves addressing a country in dire crisis. Inspired by the Cold War—with a belief in music as a public utility or common modernist revolution in art and new support from Roosevelt’s New 28 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

property, and he crafted each song in simple terms, using catchy choruses and the language of everyday life. Above all, Guthrie Glossary: caught the attention of his working class listeners with his easy, Picaresque ambling style, his casual ability to ramble from one idea or Picaresque describes any genre of literature that attitude to the next, often within the same line, laughing all the recounts the adventures of a rogue: a dishonest way through his songs. His famous “talking blues” style—with its but attractive hero. Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat is a good example, but a more familiar one is Mark corn pone puns, mealy-mouthed vocals, and steadily thumping Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, about rhythms—turned the migration experience into an inviting a prankster-outlaw living on the far edge of musical form, providing him with a flexible means to address society, whose outsider’s view provides the book’s reader with a wholly new perspective on national disaster and restore for listeners something like the the institution of slavery. original freedom and openness of the American dream. In 1940, inspired by the recent film release of The Grapes Migracious Guthrie is using the settler dialect term for of Wrath, RCA Victor approached Woody Guthrie in hopes of migrant. The word confounded Charles Todd; in recording a collection of folk songs about the Dust Bowl experi- his field notes from the Tulare Migrant Camp, ence. Guthrie was initially reluctant to take on the project, but it Todd initially transcribed it as “My Gracious!”. The error highlights the risks of ethnography, only took him one evening and a gallon of wine to condense even for researchers well-accustomed to the Steinbeck’s novel into a single six-minute marvel, “Tom Joad,” culture of their subjects. Though Todd and his (see page 30) and he was quickly inspired to create 12 more songs fellow researcher, Sonkin, were experts in American linguistics, some of the neologisms to create what later came to be titled Dust Bowl Ballads. By this (new words or coinages) of the Dust Bowl time, of course, Guthrie’s reputation as a folk poet was growing, proved difficult to interpret. and he had plenty of material from his own time on the road, but he approached the collection with characteristic self-effacement High Modernism High Modernism refers to modern thought, and genuine sympathy for the working class. As he explains in his character or practice at its most acute. We chatty liner notes to the collection, “This bunch of songs ain’t often associate the high watermark of this about me and I ain’t a going to write about me, ‘cause every time I movement with the cool and spare look of skyscrapers, or with the complex referentiality start to do that I find that I run out of material. They are ‘Oakie’ of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. songs, ‘Dust Bowl’ songs ‘Migratious’* songs, about my folks and my relatives, about a jillion of ‘em, that got hit by the drouth, the dust, the wind, the banker, and the landlord, and the police, all at the same time . . . .” Guthrie was no propagandist, and his collection follows no party line; rather, he hoped to produce a work that was both realistic and uplifting, and he believed that the closest thing to American democracy could be found close to the ground, on the roads and in the camps. He explains in his notes that he designed the collection to counter one-sided views of the migration, particular the insulting notion that all Okies were “quitters,” looking for “LIVING WITHOUT LABOR.” He wanted his songs to reveal the complexity of motives and variety of life that comprised the collective experience of the migration: he has looked in the faces of “several hundred thousands Oakies, Arkies, Texies, Mexies, Chinees, Japees, Dixies and even a lot of New Yorkees,” he writes, and by majoring in the “art and science of Migratin’” he believes that they are looking for the same thing, what “the books and bibles call Freedom.”4 Sherril Schell, “Window Reflection– Formally, Dust Bowl Ballads reflects all the dusty, derelict French Building” c. 1930-32. Philadelphia Museum of Art. glee of Guthrie’s moment. His own giddy rambling informs the collection from beginning to end, ultimately reconfiguring all Because high modernism was a reaction against the ethical and moral implications of the entire dilemma. While mass culture’s sentimental or kitschy excesses it the “dust storm” certainly appears as both great calamity and a was often associated with intellectual elitism. national swindle, it is also a genuine source of vitality, setting the American regionalist art like that of Guthrie, Benton and Steinbeck is often considered anti- entire country into motion, and the object of some great corn modernist in its embrace of unsophisticated pone humor. Simply put, the singer rejects the epic symbolism styles and humble subjects. the theatrical event of the grapes of wrath 29

of Steinbeck’s classic take on the subject, and adopts instead an They say I’m a dust bowl refugee, ironic, picaresque* approach, laughing his way through the dust Yes, they say I’m a dust bowl refugee, towards a hopeful new day. His method is migrant rather than They say I’m a dust bowl refugee, Lord, Lord, mythic, and his setlist is intentionally episodic, itinerant, An’ I ain’t a-gonna be treated this way. open-ended, and boundless in its rough-hewn hopefulness. Chuckling his way through a range of styles, voices, and attitudes, I’m a-lookin’ for a job at honest pay, Guthrie presents each song as a more or less ad hoc and ultimately I’m a-lookin’ for a job at honest pay, disposable response to an otherwise overwhelming situation. I’m a-lookin’ for a job at honest pay, Lord, Lord, The collection opener, “The Great Dust Storm Disaster” is An’ I ain’t a-gonna be treated this way. straightforward documentary, a nearly spoken list of dates and places with only a droning guitar for accompaniment. But Guthrie But sometimes all you can do is laugh at your loss. The chorus of shifts tone and tempo with each new song, offering, in turn, a “Dusty Old Dust” consists of one witty, black retort; the line is so jokey personal account (“Talking Dust Bowl Blues”), a politically utterly bleak, so completely final, but it is sung again and again in charged folktale (“Pretty Boy Floyd”), a rousing choral number ever more crafty ways—as defiance, detachment, and ultimately (“Dusty Old Dust”), a weary blues (“Dust Bowl Blues”), and that evasion—in the face of complete catastrophe: 17-verse synopsis of Steinbeck’s own novel (“Tom Joad”). The songs veer wildly from historical fact to personal reverie, from Now, the telephone rang, an’ it jumped off the wall, vicious social commentary to intimate expressions of hope and That was the preacher, a-makin’ his call. pleasure. Taken together, though, they unfurl in the air like a He said, “Kind friend, this may be the end; kaleidoscope of human moods and attitudes—anxiety, despair, An’ you got your last chance of salvation or sin!” horror, rage, humor, wonder, joy. In fact, Guthrie gives us an So long, it’s been good to know you . . . entire population of victims and survivors—farmers, preachers, So long, it’s been good to know you . . . cops, hobos, alcoholics, housewives, children, chickens, cows, So long, it’s been good to know you. and roosters; each has a special place within the great dusty This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home, collage of the whole, their voices joining together to produce a And I got to be driftin’ along. delirious, giddy whirligig of hopeful democracy. This is a fully elemental collection—composed of crazy And so the strange comedy of dust spreads across the land, crosswinds and violent blasts of hot air, but, as a social drama, dissolving, leveling, all in its pathway, eroding away the seemingly it is inherently comic rather than tragic. “The wild and windy inevitable conditions of modern life, forcing, enabling, inspiring actions of this great mysterious storm” becomes, for Guthrie, its victims to pursue new paths across the terrain, to mark it in an oddly hopeful model for human agency at large. Here, every more useful, more satisfying ways. The empty air becomes the restriction, every blocked opportunity, is also a bewildering place to sing the self and thus the nation, to drift in both deed and beginning, a new opening, a new path; each desolation leads to voice, to wander, to waver, to laugh, always, towards some better some more alluring possibility or perspective—some new clearing place and some better people. in the landscape. By a kind of dust-borne cleansing, in the Perhaps it was Guthrie’s commitment to song, rather than forceful erasure of all custom and habit, his migrant workers and print or paint, that led him to redefine social art in terms of its lost farmers all seem to come to a new vitality and hopefulness. casual production and ad hoc dynamism. By focusing on the The first song, for example, “The Great Dust Storm,” ends in a seemingly immediate and site-specific act of music-making state of stunned openness, a complete break with the past that rather than its final forms, he set the terms—common, engaged, also turns out to be the hope of an empty new day: mobile—for a counter-culture that eluded typical political categorizations as well as typical Western aesthetic values. In a It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns, way, his cheap to produce, derelict song represents the possibility It covered up our tractors in this wild and dusty storm. of the first pop counter-culture—one that, in its ramblin’ approach We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in, to art, was at once more supple and more appealing than either We rattled down that highway to never come back again. the political counter-culture of the left or the artistic counter- culture of high modernism*. But perhaps there’s a deeper Elsewhere, the crushing humility of the storm results in a com- connection to make here. Guthrie’s working class ethos seems pletely new sense of value, a certain survivor’s pride. In “Blowin’ to underlie, in more or less direct ways, American pop culture at Down this Road (I ain’t gonna be treated this way),” the migrant large, in its cheapness, disposability, and wide transmissibility. cuts his own path across the dusty landscape, marking his own Simply put, his populism was always inherently a form of pop, and hopes and values in the newly open terrain: it is this tendency to combine art and social politics that continues to inspire artists from Dylan to Springsteen to Wilco, Sufjan 30 cardinal stage company * the grapes of wrath

Stevens, the Klezmatics, and Jonatha Brooke. As we know from making continues to be a significant part of our ability to cope masterpieces such as “This Land is Your Land” and “Pastures of with such calamities and many of us—ramblers or not—still Plenty,” Guthrie’s rambling song ultimately shed its specific depend on these songs for both guidance and inspiration. regional and political determinations, but not its public utility, ______adopting an open, freewheelin’ approach to cultural exchange and Ed Comentale is an English Professor at Indiana University. thus establishing, in the form of verses and refrains floating His work as a teacher and a writer focuses on twentieth-century everywhere on the airwaves, the possibilities of a thriving pop literature and popular culture. He recently published The Year’s culture at a national level. Certainly, this is not the only way or Work in Lebowski Studies (Indiana University Press, 2009), even the most effective way to address a flood or a dust storm or a and he’s currently finishing a book manuscript titled Sweet Air: banking swindle or a terrorist attack, but this kind of music- Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song.

1 For more on this era and its arts, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997) and Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 2 Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (New York: Plume, 1983). 3 Qtd. in Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 79. 4 Liner notes reprinted in Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, eds. Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 41-2).

Guthrie Tells Steinbeck’s Story: The Ballad of “The Joads”

Here are Guthrie’s lyrics to “Tom Joad,” the Now, the twelve of the Joads made a “I preached for the Lord a mighty long time, ballad he composed for the Dust Bowl album mighty heavy load; Preached about the rich and the poor. commissioned by RCA Victor in the wake of the But Grandpa Joad did cry. Us workin’ folkses, all get together, successful film version of The Grapes of Wrath. He picked up a handful of land in his hand, ‘Cause we ain’t got a chance anymore. ______Said: “I’m stayin’ with the farm till I die. We ain’t got a chance anymore.” Tom Joad Yes, I’m stayin’ with the farm till I die.” Now, the deputies come, and Tom and Casy run Tom Joad got out of the old McAlester Pen; They fed him short ribs and coffee To the bridge where the water run down. There he got his parole. After four long years and soothing syrup; But the vigilante thugs hit Casy with a club, on a man killing charge, And Grandpa Joad did die. They laid Preacher Casy on the ground, Tom Joad come a-walkin’ down the road, They buried Grandpa Joad by the side of the road, poor Casy, poor boy, Grandma on the California side, They laid Preacher Casy on the ground. Tom Joad come a-walkin’ down the road. They buried Grandma on the California side. Tom Joad, he grabbed that deputy’s club, Tom Joad, he met a truck driving man; They stood on a mountain and they Hit him over the head. There he caught him a ride. looked to the west, Tom Joad took flight in the dark rainy night, He said, “I just got loose from McAlester Pen And it looked like the promised land. And a deputy and a preacher lying dead, two men, On a charge called homicide, That bright green valley with a river A deputy and a preacher lying dead. A charge called homicide.” running through, There was work for every single hand, Tom run back where his mother was asleep; That truck rolled away in a cloud of dust; they thought, He woke her up out of bed. Tommy turned his face toward home. There was work for every single hand. An’ he kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved, He met Preacher Casy, and they Said what Preacher Casy said, Tom Joad, had a little drink, The Joads rolled away to the jungle camp, He said what Preacher Casy said. But they found that his family they was gone, There they cooked a stew. He found that his family they was gone. And the hungry little kids of the jungle camp “Ever’body might be just one big soul, Said: “We’d like to have some, too.” Well it looks that a-way to me. He found his mother’s old fashion shoe, Said: “We’d like to have some, too.” Everywhere that you look, in the day or night, Found his daddy’s hat. That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma, And he found little Muley and Muley said, Now a deputy sheriff fired loose at a man, That’s where I’m a-gonna be. “They’ve been tractored out by the cats, Shot a woman in the back. They’ve been tractored out by the cats.” Before he could take his aim again, Wherever little children are hungry and cry, Preacher Casy dropped him in his track, Wherever people ain’t free. Tom Joad walked down to the neighbor’s farm, poor boy, Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, Found his family. Preacher Casy dropped him in his track. That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma. They took Preacher Casy and loaded in a car, That’s where I’m a-gonna be.” And his mother said, “We’ve got to get away.” They handcuffed Casy and they took him in jail; His mother said, “We’ve got to get away.” And then he got away. And he met Tom Joad on the old river bridge, And these few words he did say, poor boy, These few words he did say. the theatrical event of the grapes of wrath 31

Another Look at the Joads’ Odyssey: Guthrie’s Illustrations

As fans of the PBS series The Antiques Roadshow might know, Figure 2: This sketch is a Woody Guthrie was not just a famous composer and musician, he retrospective satire of Hoover’s was also an inveterate doodler. In his untrained but highly skilled failed Depression-era policies. way, he was an arresting visual artist: the three drawings depicted in Guthrie’s rewrite of the lines a Las Vegas episode of the Roadshow were appraised at $9,000 to on the statue’s base (“give me $15,000 partly for their provenance, but also for their raw and your muddled asses,” instead vibrant style. Interestingly, the art historian Ellen Landau writes of “give me your huddled that Guthrie’s closest inspiration was Thomas Hart Benton, whose masses”) is exemplary of the populist ethos and elongated figures he shares. comic bite he added to his social The two images below not only provide a visual correlate to and political criticism. Guthrie’s Dust Bowl music, they provided some of the inspiration For White, the appeal of for Cardinal’s production of The Grapes of Wrath. this image is its intermingling of text and image. “When I was Figure 1: This image of the storm of Figure 1: “This is the way researching The Grapes of Wrath Herbert Hoover sees the statue 1935 shows the strong overlap about Liberty,” 1947. and trying to enrich my sense of between Guthrie’s experience of the the period and region Steinbeck 1930s and Steinbeck’s novel. Like the was describing, I kept noticing Joads, Guthrie left California and that this was an era of billboards. Before TV and its public service headed announcements, the way key ideas were conveyed was through stark for California when his father’s pairings of illustrations and words. The era’s WPA posters are a livelihood—and in fact, his whole great example of how effectively this can work; I love this one, in hometown of Okemah, OK—went which the leaf and the acorn basically repeat the slogan. bust. As Guthrie writes of this time in his autobiography, Bound for Glory: “We had to move out of the house. Figure 1: Leaving Oklahoma. Papa didn’t have no money, so he From Guthrie’s early couldn’t pay the rent. He went down sketchbooks, 1935-41. fighting, but he went right on down. He was a lost man in a lost world. Lost everything. Lost every cent.” The dusty, whirlwind world of Guthrie’s early experience is spare and simple in a way that resonated with director Randy White. “Since it debuted at Steppenwolf, a signature feature of the dramatic version of The Grapes of Wrath has been its uncompromising spareness. Critics made a lot of fuss about that Ford truck Galati devised, but basically, what audiences are asked to look at in this play is a heap of dusty people on the stage. I love that kind of elemental theatricality, in which the drama lies within the Stanley Thomas Clough, “Only God Can Make a Tree,” WPA play’s human relationships and not in the technical execution of poster, 1938. Image Courtesy of sets or lights. But it is a very deceptive simplicity. You can’t just the Library of Congress. throw actors on a bare stage and think you’re done. As the eminent director Peter Brook discovered a half century ago, an empty space— To me, Guthrie’s whirling, abstract take on the Statue of a space in which great and epic things can happen—is one of the Liberty, overwritten by his anti-Hoover sentiment is a great hardest looks to execute well. I think Guthrie’s drawings really example of how strong gestures and strong ideas live side by side convey the sort of redolent emptiness I am after.” in this period. That combination is precisely what I am pursuing as I direct The Grapes of Wrath.” section 4: Recommended Resources and Events

Surviving the Dustbowl students as well as his self-promoting, 1 Oct – Linda Mearns, National Center for http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ controversy-seeking qualities. Recently Atmospheric Research. Climate Science: americanexperience/films/dustbowl/ digitally remastered, the film captures the Regional manifestations of global climate This is the accompanying website for the PBS dazzling texture and color of Benton’s regional- change documentary that was a part of a series on the ist style. Clips are available at http://www.pbs. 12 Oct – Jean Palutikof, University of Griffith. 1930s. In addition to a full transcript, the site org/kenburns/benton/film/ Climate change adaptation strategies offers terrific resources including a photo (note Tuesday 7:30-8:30pm). gallery and a series of articles on the relation- The Nature Conservancy 29 Oct – Pete Wilcoxen, Syracuse University. ship of the 1930s to our political climate today. http://www.nature.org/ Environmental and energy policies on A great multi-use resource for students and economic growth, international trade, and Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck others seeking information on everything the performance of individual industries. Studies (at San Jose State University). from the Gulf oil spill to planning a greener 12 Nov – Roy Radner, New York University. http://as.sjsu.edu/steinbeck/index.jsp wedding. The Nature Conservancy’s branch Using game theoretic tools to think about Wonderful for teachers and students, this site in Indiana is actively acquiring new lands for climate treaties. includes extensive accounts of each of environmental protection; everyting from 19 Nov – Ian Parry, Resources for the Future. Steinbeck’s novels, his life and legacy. Soon volunteer opportunities to nature treks are Designing climate change mitigation policy. to feature access to a multi-media collection. available on the organization’s website. The lectures will be held11:00am-12:10pm in SB150 (except for Jean Palutikof) and are open Voices from the Dustbowl IU Themester http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/ http://themester.indiana.edu/ to all interested parties. tshome.html The IU website includes a calendar of An extensive exhibit, curated by the American Themester related programming, including “The Scabs of Consciousness”: Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, of film screenings, art exhibits, performances, Walker Evans and James Agee Dust Bowl images, audio and text, collected by and invited lectures from scientists, authors Noon Talk on Wednesday, Charles L. Todd during his ethnographic and artists. It also lists opportunities to get October 20, 12:15–1:00 p.m. research in the FSA camps. Easy to access and involved with IU’s Themester-related Gallery of the Art of the Western World, Doris fun to explore. Part of the award-winning sustainability efforts. Steinmetz Kellett Gallery of Twentieth-century American Memory project. Art, first floor. IU Office of Sustainability Christoph Irmscher, Professor of English, will The WPA Poster Collection in the http://www.indiana.edu/~sustain/ take a fresh look at the role that Walker Evans’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue This site provides thorough lists of relevant photographs played in James Agee’s book Let Us of the Library of Congress courses, campus activities and involvement Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and discuss the http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos opportunities for students and faculty complex relationship between the writer and An amazing collection of the popular art interested in pursuing a more sustainable life, the photographer and the ways in which they generated under the WPA to advance New Deal on- and off-campus. unsettle, battle, and occasionally reaffirm the policies and advertise concerts, plays, exhibits, assumptions underlying their art forms. and community festivals. Great for those ———————————————————————————— interested in the productive overlap between Recommended Events The installation of eight Walker Evans art, design and public policy. ———————————————————————————— photographs from William Agee’s Let Us Now Those interested in the ideas, exhibits and Praise Famous Men will be on view in the Frances Perkins: The Woman archives profiled in the program should note: Indiana University Art Museum’s first floor Behind the New Deal Gallery of the Art of the Western World, https://ldpd.lamp.columbia.edu/omeka/ “Climate Change: Scientific Basis, September 28, 2010–January 10, 2011. exhibits/show/perkins Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies” A small but useful online exhibit curated by Seminar organizers: Professors Sara C. Pryor “The Toto Picture”: Writers on Sustainability Columbia University (which holds the largest & Gerhard Glomm Lilly Library, September 1 to 30 archive of Perkins’ papers) that traces Perkins’ Monday-Thursday 9:00-6:00; Friday 9:00-5:00; trailblazing political career. 3 Sep – Sara Pryor, Indiana University. Saturday 9:00-1:00; Closed Sunday. Introduction to climate science and the IPCC A rare book and manuscripts exhibit, curated Ken Burns’ Film “Thomas Hart Benton” 10 Sep – Gerhard Gloom, Indiana University. by Christoph Ismscher, featuring writers on In 1989, Ken Burns released a film for the PBS Introduction to environmental economics sustainability in the Lilly collection. As Dr. American Stories series on Benton. The profile 17 Sep – Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Irmscher’s profile of it details (see pp 25), is lively and nicely complex, revealing Benton’s Atmospheric Research. Climate Science: Steinbeck’s novel gets special attention. dedication to his heartland home and his Historical change & future projections Publication design: Terry Howe From the Henry Holmes Smith Archive, IU Art Museum Art IU Archive, Smith Holmes Henry the From Archive, IU Art Museum, 200.XX.1.2 Museum, Art IU Archive, Smith Holmes Henry print. silver Gelatin 1938. October displays. economic home and products manufacturing and agricultural included exhibits Fair.The State Louisiana Exhibit, Agricultural in Poster Lee. Russell IU Art Museum 200.XX.4.47 Museum Art IU Archive, Smith Holmes Henry print. silver Gelatin 1939. January Florida, Glade, Belle children, other three has She nearby. canal dirty the from is water The hair. child’s oldest her of out scalp, on scabs and sores and rash causes which muck, black Tennessee,the from get to trying worker house packing Youngwoman WolcottPost Marion (1910-1990). IU Art Museum 200.XX.1.114 Museum Art IU Archive, Smith Holmes Henry print. silver Gelatin Webber,1939. June Oklahoma, near workers, these of fare staple the are Beans cotton. chopping morning the spending after dinner eating laborers day Two(1903-1986). agricultural Lee Russell