Arcadia 2018; 53(2): 360–378

Lilijana Burcar
The (Forgotten) Significance of Interchapters
in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:
From Tenancy to Seasonal Migrant Farm
Labor

https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2018-0027

Abstract: In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and
criticism, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been subjected to a major inter-
pretative revision that has reoriented the focus solely on the chapters dealing with
the Joads while leaving out those that provide a detailed analysis of larger socio-
economic forces at work. The latter are laid out in documentary interchapters that
constitute the backbone of dialectical montage, a narrative method used by
Steinbeck to create a consciousness-raising novel. Documentary interchapters, as
this paper argues, shed light on the integrated forms of systemic exploitation that
agricultural workers face in capitalism. Overlooking the significance of documen-
tary interchapters results in a reductive reading of Steinbeck’s classic, which in
turn also undermines its consciousness-raising potential in our era.

Keywords: interchapters, tenancy, migrant labor, John Steinbeck, The Grapes of

Wrath

1 Introduction
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is one of the early exemplary pieces of dialectical
montage in American literature. Invented and developed by the Soviet film-maker
Sergei Eisenstein in Strike (1924) and The Battleship Potemkin (1925) ‒ and later
theoretically and practically readapted by Bertolt Brecht in his epic theatre of the
late 1920 s ‒ dialectical montage became one of the most productive narrative
 

techniques of socially committed and politically engaged American literature of

Corresponding author: Lilijana Burcar, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, English

Department, Aškerčeva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, email: lilijana.burcar@guest.arnes.si

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 361

the 1930 s. Its most prominent authors, headed at the time by John Steinbeck and
 

John Dos Passos (U. S. A. Trilogy), sought to shed light on the causes of the
 

structural inequalities and systemic injustices of the capitalist system in a min-

utely organized and comprehensive manner rather than in a distortedly partial
and limited way. This by necessity meant departing from the constraints of a
linear chronological narrative and limited third-person point of view associated
with one, or at best two, central individual protagonists of classical realism.
Dialectical montage, initially referred to as intellectual montage by Sergei Eisen-
stein (1969), works by means of meaningful juxtapositions whereby seemingly
disparate scenes, incidents, or themes separate in time and place are brought
together to reveal their structural interconnectedness in the broader context of
capitalist social relations (Brecht 1961). The purpose of dialectical montage is to
expose and dissect the basic building blocks of capitalist social relations, that is,
to draw attention to the causes of structural injustices and render visible the
operating mechanisms upon which systemic exploitation rests.
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel of social protest, which on the surface appears
to concern itself with the individualized plight of displaced agricultural workers
from the farm-belt states in the Great Plains following the Great Depression in the
1930 s. In reality, it is a “broad social novel” (Howarth 72) that sheds light on the
 

way agriculture is organized and run in the capitalist system, pointing among
other things to the land grab and big private monopolies. Steinbeck wanted to
write the kind of novel that would “bear witness to the historical truth about
American economics, psychology, and politics others chose to ignore” (Zirakza-
deh, Containing 1), claiming for himself the status of a writer whose “philosophic
vision would punctuate fashionable but misleading myths about [the US] and
provide an unadorned view of reality” (Zirakzadeh, John Steinbeck 606). It was for
this reason that upon its publication, The Grapes of Wrath was recognized as a
“realist interpretative text” (Henderson 212) and a “social document” offering “a
vivid and a valid dramatization of conditions that really exist” (Caughey 353).
Steinbeck’s novel turned out to be a serious attempt to lay bare the system of
exploitation and oppression facing farmworkers, embodied most often in the form
of tenant farming on the one hand and forced seasonal migrant labor on the
other.
In writing a socially engaged novel, Steinbeck adopted a special technique
of montage. The narrative that focuses on the exploitation and the struggle of
the Joads, a family of displaced tenant farmers from Oklahoma, is intertwined
with inserted documentary chapters or the so-called intercalary chapters (Swen-
sen 63). These documentary interchapters serve as expository or explanatory
chapters providing an in-depth analysis of the structural processes that lead to
and cement the exploitation of the ʽlittle farm people.ʼ The seemingly isolated

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362 Lilijana Burcar

strife of the Joads is thus put into a broader social and historical perspective.
Rather than just drawing attention to the results of the system of exploitation,
such as misery, starvation and the death of farmworkers, the novel points to
their underlying causes precisely by undertaking a systemic analysis of them
with the help of documentary-like data (Burcar 85). In doing so, it foregrounds
the “parallelism between large and small events” (Howarth 74), that is, between
the seemingly abstract forces of history and concrete everyday events facing
farmworkers. Steinbeck’s writing technique is a way of alternating between the
“general” and the “particular” (94), driving home the point that an individual is
always related to the whole and to “society as a system of interrelated forces”
(Conder 144). It is for this reason that the novel constantly moves back and forth
from a broad panoramic view, which gives an insight into the sociohistorical
context and the history of capitalist agriculture, to “portraits and extreme close-
ups” of individual farm workers, the Joads (Howarth 74). In this way, individual
characters constituting the displaced tenant family become representative of a
multitude of other fellow sufferers. Their exploitation and oppression is under-
stood to be the result of concrete systemic and man-made sociopolitical forces,
which documentary interchapters render not only fully visible but also fully
graspable.
The so-called cultural turn of the 1980 s witnessed the rise of postmodernism
 

underwritten by its insistence on meaning being elusive, ungraspable, and end-

lessly fragmented to the point of absurdity (Eagleton 1996). This in turn marked a
withdrawal from the structural investigation of social reality and from the focus
on the actual production of meanings (Jameson 1991) along with attendant
ideologies in an era mired in a new wave of epistemological violence brought
about by the expansion and reorganization of capitalist social relations on a
global scale (Chomsky 2011). Consequently, and in tune with the reality of the
new homogenous world order, dialectical montage along with its panoramic
novels of social protest has been both side-tracked and historically decontextua-
lized by mainstream literary critics. Symptomatically, Steinbeck’s classic novel
about the exploitation of farmers in the first three decades of the 20th century is
today most often reductively reinterpreted as a novel that merely addresses a
personal misfortune that has befallen the Joads as a result of a natural disaster,
culminating in their migration to California. This approach leaves out the key
sections that constitute social commentaries carried in separate and central
chapters of the novel, and which alternately intertwine with those focused on the
Joads. With these key chapters of dialectical montage elided from mainstream
literary interpretations, the Joads’ migration to the West tends to be reductively
depicted as simply originating in a natural disaster that prompts the family to
move, while the novel, in fact, records and dissects the transition from the system

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 363

of tenant farming to large-scale industrial farming which in capitalist agriculture

economy is based on highly exploitable seasonal migrant labor. The novel, as this
paper argues, uses what was in reality a man-made natural disaster of the 1930 s  

to record the transition from one form of exploitative working and living condi-
tions to another, laying bare the way agriculture is organized and run in capital-
ism.

2 The Great Plains: Land Privatization and

Tenancy
Typically, mainstream literary references or summaries of the novel in circulation
today present the Dust Storm and consequent crop failure as the origin of the
Joads’ misfortune, and as the key underlying reason for their forced migration
from Oklahoma to California.1 Sometimes this is also accompanied by an occa-
sional mention of the mechanization of farming, which, however, remains histori-
cally decontextualized (cf. Burns 70). The causes of the Joads’ suffering in this
way become linked to the whims of nature over which ordinary mortals suppo-
sedly have no control. Such interpretations that proliferate in mainstream acade-
mia and literary criticism today obscure the real man-made causes of the disaster,
which Steinbeck painstakingly delineates in the first few interchapters. Here he
shows that the Dust Storm as well as the forceful displacement of the Joads are
directly linked to “the (capitalist) economic order” (Worster, qtd. in Teisch 153)
specifically to land privatization, “land speculation, monopolies and tenancy”
(Teisch 154) spurred along by the American government since the middle of the
19th century, and to the introduction of cash crops or commercial “monocultures,
diskplowing, and dry-farming” to the Great Plains (159). The latter helped to
maximize the profits for the newly established absentee landlords, primarily
private banks located in the East,2 while gambling on the stock market by the

1 See for example academic sources ranging from Encyclopedia of American Folklore by Linda
S. Watts (230) to Robert Demott’s Introduction to Penguin’s 2006 edition of Steinbeck’s The Grapes
of Wrath, and mainstream sources such as Wikipedia (“The Grapes of Wrath”) and online
students’ reference guides such as Cliffnotes (“The Grapes of Wrath at a Glance”).
2 In chapter five, which is the second interchapter, we read that local banks function either as
local branches or affiliates to the central banks headquartered in the East, or that they are simply
part of a business portfolio owned by and therefore beholden to the interests of other, bigger
private businesses. Either way, the reference is to landlords in absentia and to the concentration
of land ownership in a few hands among the most powerful corporate entities in the country:

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364 Lilijana Burcar

same major private corporate agents over types of crop production and price
speculation would eventually result in increased debts on the part of tenant
farmers and the remaining small-hold farmers. One of the consequences of such a
commodified approach to semi-arid land was its quick depletion and deteriora-
tion, made worse by successive droughts. The droughts and the Dust Storm that
followed in the 1930 s were not isolated phenomena and the direct causes of the
 

farmers’ misfortune but, as pointed out by historians, the result of bigger pro-
cesses a long time in the making (Asch and Mangus 9), and directly linked to the
way agricultural production had been and continues to be run under capitalism
to this day.

2.1 Homesteading

The first documentary interchapters lay bare the origins of government-supported

land theft and the government-sponsored processes leading to eventual consoli-
dation of private land ownership and its monopolization in the hands of the few.
This, as we are reminded in the first two interchapters, was put in place through a
series of so-called 19th-century homestead acts in the newly established farm belt-
states, which Steinbeck goes on to list in a later interchapter as Oklahoma,
Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arkansas (317). The point of these
homestead acts, as we come to learn in interchapters five and seven, was to
appropriate and parcel up the land taken from Native Americans and to put it into
the hands of a selected group of new white arrivals or so-called settler farmers,
who were drawn from the Eastern board from among the impoverished farmers
and, more often, destitute urban population (Zinn 282). These new white arrivals
were to carry out the hard manual labor of clearing the land or converting it from
what were grassy plains suitable only for grazing, something that Native Amer-
icans were very well aware of, into supposedly arable land that was to yield
higher and higher rates of annual produce through ever more intensive cultiva-
tion. This is clearly captured in the following two lines: “Grampa took up the land,
and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here, and he
killed weeds and snakes.” (45)
The homesteading that Steinbeck directly alludes to in his first documentary
chapters is the great myth of one of the phases of American colonization or the so-
called expansion of the Western frontier, the point of which was a double

“‘Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show
profit or we’ll close you up’.” (Steinbeck 52)

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 365

dispossession. First, this process rested on the taking of the land from Native
Americans by killing the majority of the population while forcefully removing and
dispossessing those that still remained in place after a new wave of genocidal
policies that marked the 19th century, starting with the Removal Act of 1830 and
then the Dawes Act of 1887 (Farina del Mar 25).3 Secondly, it rested on the division
and privatization of formerly commonly owned Native American land through the
imposition of small white family-holdings or homesteads, whose residents, as it
turned out, were to be eventually stripped of their temporary private land owner-
ship. The Homestead Act invested family heads with the right to “qualify for a
grant of 160 acres [...] by paying a small registration fee and living on the land
continuously for five years. If the settler was willing to pay $ 1.35 [sic! 1.25] an
acre, he could obtain the land after only six months’ residence.” (Pinsker) Cru-
cially, as pointed out by historians, most of the families did not have the means to
undertake the cost-expensive process of farming so that “much of the land
granted under the Homestead Act fell quickly into the hands of speculators”
(Pinsker). In other words, the government made sure the system was run in
accordance with the economic tenets of capitalist society. This would ensure by
its own economic mechanisms that the concentration of land ownership, once the
land was cleared, would lie in the hands of so called robber barons of the time
(Zinn 261), primarily private bank owners. One of such mechanisms in capitalist
economies, for example, has been the structurally enforced reliance of farmers on
private banks and other lenders ‒ who are in the business of charging exorbitant
interest rates ‒ instead of relying on agricultural cooperatives and their internal
support mechanisms, where loans are given out without or at minimal interest

3 While the first act led to the forceful removal of Native American peoples east of the Mississippi
to newly reallocated land considered of no interest to whites because deemed infertile and lacking
in other natural resources (Farina del Mar), the Dawes Act legally endorsed the confiscation of
more than 60,000,000 acres of land to be taken away from Native Americans occupying the Great
Plains (Bonvillain 19). By leaving Native Americans virtually with nothing – a policy also
endorsed through brutally coercive measures such as the US army’s burning of Native American
villages on the Plains (Zinn 183) – it helped to “open up” the land to the new arrivals, white
homesteaders. Significantly, as pointed out by Zinn, it was the private railway companies in the
making that were in fact to “move in first and take the best land” with “the farmers coming in for
what was left” (183). While private railway companies, whose shareholders sat in successive
American governments, were given free land grants, hefty government subsidies at below com-
mercial interest rates and additional free land for each mile of track laid, the so-called white
homesteaders had to pay a fee to the government to be able to claim the land and cover for the
start-up expenses themselves (Strom 15). Most significantly, they were to be primarily drawn from
among the destitute urban population of the East, with the capital representatives sitting in
Congress hoping to resolve the class conflict by simply relocating and thus disposing of its own
impoverished, and ever more and more union-prone white labor force (Zinn 282).

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366 Lilijana Burcar

rates, and, in times of crisis, in deferred installments. In interchapter five, this

process of dispossession is captured concisely through the voices of the impover-
ished men that now occupy the farms but are left helpless in the face of larger
socioeconomic forces at work:

Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. [...] Then a
bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An’ we was born here. [...] And Pa had to
borrow the money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of
what we raised. (Steinbeck 45)

In this system, small and unsubsidized farmers continue to run deeper and deeper
into debt while trying to keep up with the basic maintenance costs of the farm
equipment and seed acquisition and to make it through bad seasons in case of
crop failure and volatile prices on speculative markets. The key emphasis in
interchapter five is on small farmers being pushed into a corner and coming out
of this process as no longer the owners of their farms. In the process of land grab
and ownership consolidation that Steinbeck’s interchapter delineates, small
farmers and their families were to be gradually disowned and turned into tenant
farmers, which explains why they are now able to keep only a tiny portion of the
produce they grow.

2.2 Tenancy Farming and Indentured Farm Labor

Being a tenant farmer meant that one did not own the land that one tilled but
rented it. Consequently, the housing too, as Johnson explains in a different
context, “was either rented from or provided by the land owner. The tenant
farmer paid his rent from the produce he raised. For the use of the house and
land, he paid the owner with [at least] ½ of the harvested crops.” (123). Tenant
farming was a system run on the principle of taking a substantial amount of what
the farmers grew away from them either “in the form of a share of crops or a
share of the sales of the crop” (“Tenant Farming”). This automatically left share-
croppers and the rest of the tenant farmers struggling on the brink of survival in
good years alone, while pushing them further into abject poverty in times of crop
failure or plummeting market prices (Petty 524). Steinbeck addresses the abject
poverty and squalor witnessed in the condition of the tenants’ decrepit houses,
and in their children who cannot attend schools: they go around barefoot,
standing in front of well-dressed bank agents “wide eyed” with “one bare foot on
top of the other” (42). Furthermore, the rate and the extent of the tenant farmers’
exploitation was deepened by the fact that they had to provide the input needed
to run and till the landlord’s estate, which included the working equipment,

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 367

seeds and other basic supplies on the one hand, and their own essentials such as
food and clothing on the other (Hyde). In both cases, even if tenant farmers were
given a plot to grow some of their own food, they ended up subsidizing land-
owners who exempted themselves from social responsibility for the maintenance
and upkeep of their own workforce and from the input costs necessary for the
basic running and maintenance of their own estates. Tenant farmers could do so
only by taking out additional loans, usually with the landlords themselves, who
also charged “exorbitant rates of interest” (Lessig). To make matters worse, on
the demand of the landowners, who were prone to speculation on stock markets,
most of the tenant farmers were forced to grow only one type of cash crop even
“to the exclusion of production of food and feed crops for home use” (Asch and
Mangus 10). This meant not only that in good seasons farmers would be unable
to rely on other crops, “accumulat[ing] reserves” for bad seasons and creating
“an alternative source of income” in case of the main crop’s failure or its
substantially reduced market prices, but were, ironically, also left “with no
products for home consumption” (147). This situation is brought to the fore by
one of Steinbeck’s tenant farmers in the crucial interchapter on tenancy, chapter
five, where at first sight it looks paradoxical that a farmer surrounded by acres of
land has no home-grown food and needs to rely on a grocer: “An’ ever’body got
bills at the grocery. You know how it is.” (64) Later on, we learn that cotton, the
only cash-crop the Joads are allowed to grow, in times of economic crises now
reaches all the way to the threshold of the family house, leaving no strip of spare
land for any other crop, because the bank and the landowner must after all go on
to “breathe profits” (43).
In the end, as pointed out by Petty, tenant farmers had to cede at least half of
the crop or the value of the crop regardless of that year’s conditions in exchange
for renting the land while “in effect” also “advancing a season’s worth of labor to
the landlord before receiving any pay at all” (523). In the meantime, they were
expected to fall back on credits landlords and local merchants in order to obtain
“food, clothing and other essentials” as well as seeds and farming tools, both at
exorbitant interest rates, with the landlords and local merchants thus also “pla-
cing a lien on the farmers’ [other] half of the crop” (Hyde 157). In this way, tenant
farmers ended up “deliver[ing] half of the crops to the landlord” while “us[ing]
the rest to settle up with the merchant” (157) in a good year, who most often was
the same person, that is, the landlord himself. It was a cycle to be repeated every
year with new additional loans to be taken out in bad seasons of crop failure to
pay both for the rent on the land and the housing and to settle the credits for basic
provisions, which cemented tenants’ entrapment in permanent poverty. As ob-
served by historians, the system of tenant farming was in a sense a modernized
capitalist version of the old serf-feudal lord system (Vardi), whilst some others

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368 Lilijana Burcar

have correctly noted that “tenant farming created a system similar to indentured
servitude” (“Tenant Farming”). Tenant farming or tenancy was, namely, a system
run on the principle of debt peonage, which also secured the labor force for the
owners by keeping people pinned down in one place. As Johnson explains:

Because both tenant farmers and sharecroppers had to borrow money from the owners to
buy farm supplies and pay for the first year’s expenses (until the crops came in [if ever,
L. B.]), they were always in debt to the owner. With all members of the family working, the
average income was about $200 a year, much of which had to go to pay off debts. Their
living conditions were squalid, malnutrition was epidemic, and death rates were high. (123)

Steinbeck brings all of these multivalent factors together in the first two inter-
chapters when describing the conditions facing tenant farmers. They have accu-
mulated additional debts in the face of a prolonged season of drought and now
find themselves threatened with foreclosure by the true, and to the ordinary
people, invisible owners of their land, that is, the banks and other business
conglomerates: “[T]he squatting men looked down again. What do you want us to
do? We can’t take less share of the crop – we’re half starved now. The kids are
hungry all the time. We got no clothes, torn an’ ragged. If all the neighbors
weren’t the same, we’d be ashamed to go to meeting.” (Steinbeck 44)
A common practice on the part of landlords in bad seasons ‒ and this is more
poignantly brought home during the Dust Storm with “[d]ust comin’ up an’
spoilin’ ever’thing so a man didn’t get enough crop to plug up an ant’s ass” (64) ‒
was to transfer the risk of debts onto the shoulders of tenant farmers (Petty 524).
This would mean further cutting their share of the crop and thus completely
eroding their means of survival. Faced with foreclosure and eviction, Steinbeck’s
tenant farmers cannot be pushed further into the corner by agreeing to see their
share of the crop cut even beyond the starvation level they already face under the
ordinary circumstances. Systemic exploitation and the resulting poverty of tenant
farmers are thus fully disclosed as are indeed their main structural causes.

2.3 In the Name of Profit: Land Depletion and Destruction of

the Great Plains
While focusing on the process of dispossession and the installment of tenancy as
one way of proletarizing farmers, the interchapters referring to the Great Plains
simultaneously also draw attention to a systemic depletion and degradation of
the land. They point again to an intricate web of man-made causes linked to the
capitalist socioeconomic system of land management and profit extraction that
would eventually culminate in the Dust Storm. Colonization of the Great Plains

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 369

through homesteading rested on the conversion of land suitable for grazing only
into land now destined for agriculture. The soil, which previously was kept in
place and sufficiently moistened by the top layer of native grasses and their deep-
reaching roots (National Endowment), would become loose and eventually also
less fertile once it started to be ploughed on an annual basis without being
allowed to lie fallow. These factors would “destroy[] the regenerative processes
that had kept [the] soils fertile and intact” (Teisch 159), a point neatly captured
also by a member of the Joads’ family: “Ever’ year I can remember, we had a good
crop comin’ and’ it never come. Grampa says she was good the first five plowin’s,
while the wild grass was still in her.” (Steinbeck 37) In search for maximum profits
on the part of the big absentee landlords, extensive cultivation of cash monocul-
tures such as wheat and especially cotton was introduced to the Great Plains,
even though the land was of marginal quality (Asch and Magnus; National
Endowment). This, in combination with the stripping of the land of its grasses,
further impoverished and finally destroyed the land. As observed by one of the
Joads’ neighbors: “I know this land ain’t much good. Never was much good ‘cept
for grazin’. Never should a broke her up. An’ now she’s cottoned damn dear to
death.” (Steinbeck 64) Cotton takes a lot of nutrients and water out of the land
and if not rotated, it eventually kills the land. History shows it was the landlords
that decreed what kind of crop was to be planted every year as this would also tie
in with their speculations on the stock market (Hyde 157). In search for maximum
short term-profits, they required that only the most profitable type of crop be
cultivated, that is, the kind of crop that would fetch the highest price on what
were and remain volatile stock markets – in the North, this meant cotton and
wheat and, in the South, cotton and tobacco (Zinn 183). This is also a desperate
situation Steinbeck’s tenant farmers face. To make the most out of the land in a
short run, the land, under the orders of the absentee lords, is to be fully utilized or
rather overcropped, that is, it is to be planted with a cash monoculture only and
not allowed to lie fallow for “the monster” must have maximum profits at all
times:

The owner men went on leading to their point: You know the land’s getting poorer. You
know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it. The squatters
nodded – they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood
back into the land. (Steinbeck 43)

The insistence of absentee landlords that tenants plant only the most profitable
type of cash crop led very quickly to “overproduction and falling prices” (Hyde
157) in general and the destruction of the land on the Great Plains. The landlords’
answer to this newly incurred problem that threatened to erode their profit margin
was not to “adjust the agricultural practices” (157) but erroneously, in their drive

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370 Lilijana Burcar

for maximum profits, to “encourage increasingly desperate farmers to plant even

more cotton in a futile attempt to improve their situation” (157) and, most
importantly, that of the landlords themselves. It is for this reason that Steinbeck’s
tenant farmers too are left in a vice, with no voice of their own to decide what to
plant and how to plant and cultivate the land.
The large-scale introduction of extensive monocultures like cotton or wheat
not suitable to the Great Plains was directly linked to the speculation in prices on
the stock market, especially after the collapse of the European agricultural
markets during WWI (Johnson 122). Between 1915 and 1919, Europe relied on the
wheat and cotton produced in the US, and “the escalating prices of wheat during
WWI encouraged the cultivation of large areas of the Great Plains previously used
only for grazing” (Kipen et al. 16). Even though the land did not belong to them,
tenant farmers were obliged to take out loans also in the so-called good times
either to increase the production or ensure the transfer to new monocultures, thus
absolving big owners from investing into their own land. In an attempt to alleviate
their poverty by betting on prices going up in times of war scarcity, the Great
Plains farmers, as Steinbeck reminds us, were forced to go along with big
business’s interests and its major stakes in war profits. Hence, when threatened
with foreclosure, tenant farmers, who wished to cling to the land they rented as
their source of livelihood, raised the issue of cotton as a war crop:

Can’t we just hang on? Maybe the next year will be a good year, God knows how much
cotton next year. And with all the wars, God knows what price cotton will bring. Don’t they
make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling.
(Steinbeck 43‒44)

Once the European agriculture recovered and the overseas markets were lost,
American tenant and small farmers were left to struggle not only with newly
accumulated debts but also with a continual drop in prices for their produce. At
the same time, the appetites of the “monster” (44) ‒ that is, the private banks and
companies with ownership stakes in the land tilled by tenant farmers ‒ of course
remained the same and knew no limits or mercy. As explained by the owners’
representatives in one of the interchapters: “The bank ‒ the monster has to have
profits at all times.” (44) Once the beleaguered tenant farmers finally put up
resistance, warning the owners their appetite for profit “will kill the land with
cotton” (44), the answer tenant farmers receive is revealing: “We know. We’ve got
to take cotton quick before the land dies. Then we’ll sell the land. Lots of families
in the East would like to own a piece of land.” (45) Through its marketing tricks,
the monster will continue to breathe extra profits by first insisting that farmers
choke the land with cotton and utilize it without crop rotation, thus squeezing out
of it its last ounce of water and nutrient supply, and then by reselling the

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 371

destroyed and worthless land as an imaginary piece of investment for the impo-
verished new arrivals from the East, who are not in the know.
Steinbeck’s presentation of this grim reality and the mechanisms that drive it
serves as a counterweight to mainstream economic treatises of the time4 and
contemporary mainstream historical books that place the blame for overcropping
and land depletion on tenant farmers themselves. In one of such recent contribu-
tions dating from 2005, we read: “Another consequence of tenant farming was the
depletion of the land. Many farmers were not motivated to make improvements or
rotate the crops to prevent nutrient depletion since the land did not belong to
them.” (“Tenant Farming”) In accordance with the neoliberal mantra, contempor-
ary mainstream historians saddle the exploited and the victims of the system with
the blame for land destruction. They point their finger at the tenant farmers’
supposedly disinterested attitude towards the land, which they go on to interpret
as having its origin in their lack of ownership. In this way, they elide the actual
causes and structural forces at work that Steinbeck’s interchapters, painstakingly,
draw attention to. Within the interchapters (and otherwise), common sense has it
that (tenant) farmers’ survival depends on their hard work, expertise and interest
in the land regardless of the type of ownership, unlike that of absentee landlords,
the actual private owners, for whom land and its private ownership, is just a part
of a business portfolio, and therefore merely one of the checker pieces on the
board to be made use of and disposed of. Poignantly, Steinbeck’s interchapters
succinctly point to the dangers of private corporate ownership and enclosures,
which mainstream (literary) criticism today refuses to acknowledge.

4 Mainstream economic treatises on this issue, whose authors were of course beholden to the
capitalist system, revolved around the internal quarrel whether tenancy was “efficient enough”
for the landlords, that is, whether it allowed land owners to squeeze the maximum amount of
labor out of their farm workers and their families. Two economic schools emerged: upon the
publication of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics in 1920, the so-called Marshall school
argued this was not the case, declaring the system to be “morally hazardous” to the landlords in
the sense that the tenants, because they could not be directly controlled all year round, were not
to be trusted. Again in the 1960 s, the founder of the Cheung school claimed that “tenants have
 

every incentive to produce efficiently given the threat of eviction by the landlord” (Bellemare 491).
Both economic schools defended the system of exploitation: the bone of the quarrel was whether
tenancy was sufficient enough in its rate of expropriation for landlords.

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372 Lilijana Burcar

3 Displacement of Tenant Farmers and the

Phasing in of Waged Migrant Labor: California,
Here We Come
Besides inappropriate land use for the sake of reaping greater profits, price
speculation, the crash of the markets and the resulting natural disaster, Stein-
beck’s interchapters clearly show that the primary reason why the Joads and other
tenant farmers in Oklahoma and elsewhere on the Great Plains are driven off the
land has to do with a new phase of profit extraction and land consolidation in the
private hands of land barons and banks. The capital owners at this point in
history sought to replace the system of tenancy with an even less costly one of
migrant seasonal labor, which requires no social upkeep of farm workers and
therefore zero social responsibility on the part of land owners throughout the
year. It is at this crucial moment that “at last the owner men c[o]me to the point,”
declaring that “the tenant system won’t work any more [for them, L. B. ]. One man
on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and
take all the crop.” (Steinbeck 44) That is why tenant farmers “will have to go”
(46). This is then echoed and further explicated in the speech offered by one of the
Joads’ neighbors who goes on to explain:

Joad said, “What’s the idear of kickin’ the folks off?”

“[...] Well, the folks that owns the lan’ says, ‘We can’t afford to keep no tenants.’ An’ they
says, ‘The share a tenant gets is jus’ the margin a profit we can’t afford to lose.’ An’ they
says, ‘If we put all our lan’ in one piece we can jus’ hardly make her pay.’ So they tractored
all the tenants off a the lan’. (64)

Private land owners come to the conclusion that the tenant system is less profit-
able than that based on migrant waged labor. The latter keeps people on the move
and requires no additional land to be set aside for the needs of the laborer nor
does it require that the laborer be paid a share of the crop. By paying laborers a
wage instead while providing no social amenities, the landlords’ share of the
profit can be increased as well as their control over the workers. In addition,
waged seasonal workers, like most waged workers, are paid only a tiny fraction in
exchange for the real worth of their labor, which through the creation of pro-
longed seasons of unemployment and artificially induced competition in harvest
time can be depressed even further. This is a point driven home a number of times
later in the interchapters and through field workers’ own commentaries on the
working and living conditions facing seasonal farm laborers in California: “You
ain’t gonna get no steady work. Gonna scrabble for your dinner ever’ day. An’ you
gonna do [the land] with people lookin’ mean at you” (281), that is, with “straw

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 373

bosses to see that the stooping men [are] moving along the rows as swiftly as the
material of their bodies could stand” (317). In the end, “[t]here just ain’t quite
enough to eat no matter what you do,” no matter whether you “work hard enough
and move fast enough” (349). It is no wonder that at the time Congress was in
favor of phasing this system in, with some politicians openly claiming it would
“provide communities [of medium and large estate owners, L. B.] with access to
[even more] cheap[ened], agricultural labor power” (Zinn 282).
This historical era, starting with the 1910 s and the 1920 s, was marked by a
   

major reorganization of agricultural production and surplus labor extraction, an

essential part of which was also the introduction of mechanization. Some main-
stream interpretations of the novel, which no longer include the focus on inter-
chapters, tend to represent mechanization, embodied here in the form of tractors,
and the Dust Storm as the main push factors for the Joads’ displacement and
emigration. In Ryan Hall’s article “Struggle and Survival in Sallisaw,” we read
that “farmers were torn from the land as corporate-owned tractors ripped up the
parched and dying soil” (33) while in L. Stuart Burns’s “On the Symbol of the
Turtle” we find an earlier echo of the same thought: “[T]he Joads are first
displaced by machines and then rendered helplessly dependent on the Hudson”
(70). Yet mechanization of agriculture as such is not solely to blame for the Joads’
removal. As Steinbeck’s interchapters show, the crucial factor is the kind of
system of agriculture that machinery is incorporated into and which it helps to
uphold. Mechanization on the Great Plains became part and parcel of a new
systemic reorganization of agriculture under capitalism, a system already inher-
ent in California’s agricultural production. There, it rested from the start on large-
estate ownership with the establishments specializing in one monoculture or so-
called specialty crop only (Pinto 154), which is the key element also for the
understanding of labor reorganization and its exploitation. Steinbeck exemplifies
this explicitly:

“‘They’s big son-of-a-bitch of a peach orchard I worked in. Takes nine men all the year roun’.
[...] Takes three thousan’, and they get six thousan’. They get them men for what they wanta
pay. If ya don’ wanta take what they pay, goddam it, they’s a thousan’ men waitin’ for your
job. So ya pick, an’ ya pick, an’ then she’s done. Whole part a the country’s peaches. All ripe
together. When ya get ‘em picked, ever’ goddam one is picked. There ain’t another damn
thing in that part a the country to do. An’ then them owners don’ want you there no more.
Three thousan’ of you’.” (335)

Crucially, with there being no diversity of cultures to be taken care of throughout

the year ‒ that is, at different times of their planting and stages of growth ‒ it
remains that only a few people can be employed on an annual basis to take care
of the mechanized processes that have to do with the planting of one single crop,

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374 Lilijana Burcar

while the majority of work is now done by migrant seasonal labor at the end of the
growth season when the only kind of harvest still needs picking. In both cases,
the cost of social reproduction that should be the responsibility of the landlords
as employers is annulled in exchange for a wage that stands in for only a fraction
of the labor put in by the workers to the exclusion of the costs of their basic
maintenance and social upkeep. Workers must now provide these on their own,
usually by accumulating debts. In the end, as delineated in interchapter nineteen,
an estate owner thus eventually also turned a shop owner “paid the men, and
sold them food, and took the money back. [...] These farms gave food on credit. A
man might work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might find
that he owed money to the company” (317) he worked for.
The Dust Storm, a man-made natural disaster a long time in the making,
conveniently coincided with the final stage of another man-made plan also
already a long time in the making, that is, the replacement of tenant farmers with
seasonal migrant laborers. By leaving the Great Plains behind with “new tractors
going on the land” (318) and embarking on their journey to California, the Joads
are in fact leaving behind the first signs of a system in the making that they will
have to face in its full operation in California. Structurally, the journey of dis-
placed tenant farmers is a circular one in a double sense: not only do the
displaced tenant farmers move from one form of exploitation to another, but in
the process of doing so, they are ironically displaced by the very system they will
have to embrace in California. This is the system of seasonal migrant waged labor
which is in the process of being installed in their part of the country and which in
a sense, they only appear to be leaving behind for good. The interchapters bring
to the fore the processes of farm labor proletarization and modes of exploitation
by placing side by side the operating mechanisms of tenant farming and migrant
seasonal farm labor. These come to constitute a specific kind of an assemblage or
a meaningful juxtaposition, which in turn enables the reader to view the two
modes of farm labor exploitation as part of connected processes having to do with
land privatization and the consolidation of corporate-owned and corporate-run
agriculture.
California, as we are reminded in the interchapters that follow the Joads’ arrival
to this promised land, is a “beautiful fraud,” whose history is also inevitably based
on land theft, farmland privatization and the maintenance of seasonal migrant
labor, which is a new form of “serf-like labour” (Teisch 153). Since its inception as
an Anglo-Saxon farming colony in the 19th century, when the land, as we are
reminded by Steinbeck, was expropriated or “stolen” from the natives and the
Mexicans (Steinbeck 315) with “fellas brib[ing] congressmen and legislatures” (323)
in order to secure land grants (315), California has served as a textbook example of
an “integrated” private farming industry (Teisch 163). In other words, it has rested

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 The Interchapters in The Grapes of Wrath 375

on “corporate outsiders, land syndicates, water companies, railroads, and can-

neries” monopolizing and running the agricultural production based solely on the
cultivation of single mono-cultures (163). Thus, upon their arrival, displaced tenant
farmers find that “ever’thing in California is [again privately, L. B.] owned.” (Stein-
beck 280) We go on to read: “They’s a grove of yella oranges – an’ a guy with a gun
that got the right to kill you if you touch one. They’s a fella, newspaper fella near the
coast, got a million acres –.’” (281) The tenant farmers’ journey is indeed circular.
As pointed out by Garcia (88), “the monster” or capitalism found

in California differs in no essential respect from the sphinx that besieges Oklahoma [and]
whose agents are the large landowners and banks. [...] Like the owners from the East who
expropriated lands in Oklahoma, the large owners of California convert farming to industry,
create the mega-farm, displace the grain fields, and remove themselves from the land to rule
in absentia, while exploiting the dispossessed and attacking their primitive efforts to union-
ize.

The key is to keep the workers on the move, never allowing them to settle, which
leads to their fragmentation and lack of negotiating power on the one hand, and
to their inability to exercise rights of access to “meagre social services” (Johnson
131) on the other, which is precisely due to their inability to claim permanent
residency. These two structural factors combined effectively, turn them into a
pool of superexploited labor.
In addition to drawing attention to wage depression and strike-breaking
methods on the part of corporate farmers’ associations, Steinbeck’s concluding
interchapters not only drive this point home several times but actually end on this
note. At the end, when some of the seasonal workers are left adrift in the midst of
the apocalyptic flooding, we read: “Then some went to the relief offices, and they
came sadly back to their own people. They’s rules – you got to be here a year
before you can git relief!” (590) This is a state of affairs that persists and is legally
maintained to this day albeit in a different way and by more repressive mechan-
isms, as reported by field activists, historians and sociologists (Weber). The post-
WWII invention of the category of a temporary, non-immigrant worker has led to
the production of “a group of [permanent] non-citizens who [...] can legally be
exempted from law on minimum employment standards, collective bargaining
and the provision of social services and programs such as unemployment insur-
ance, social assistance, old-age pensions, etc. This in turn cheapens and weakens
the position of these workers” (Sharma 427). It makes seasonal migrant farm
laborers extremely vulnerable, and subject to immediate deportations should
they refuse to comply with the demands of their employers.

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376 Lilijana Burcar

4 Conclusion
With the onset of WWII, former Great-Plains tenant farmers were diverted into the
armament industry (Bays 392). In the fields of California, they were immediately
replaced by Latin American migrant workers as part of the US government’s so-
called temporary guest worker programs (Johnson 133). Migrant seasonal labor, as
we are reminded by The Grapes of Wrath, is structurally indispensable to the
capitalist machinery and part and parcel of the way the corporate agricultural
system continues to reap greater profits and continues to be run today. An extre-
mely vulnerable and exploitable status of field workers in the US today is main-
tained as a result of the legal imposition of a permanently non-citizen and therefore
non-residential status. The main target of labor recruitment today is displaced Latin
American peoples. Whether documented or undocumented, once officially desig-
nated as permanently temporary migrant labor, Latin American seasonal farm
laborers are legally excluded “from federal wage and hour legislation” and have no
right to form or join unions (Ness 445), otherwise they face immediate deportation.
Rather than just drawing attention to a chapter in the history of the US,
Steinbeck’s intervening documentary chapters help to raise general awareness of
seemingly different but in reality structurally interrelated facets of the agricultural
system under capitalism, keeping us also alert to contemporary forms of systemic
exploitation in the American fields. The interchapters are crucial to the tracing of
these processes: they allow for a systemic and detailed examination of the structur-
al forces at work that lead to a specific set of working and living conditions facing
those at the receiving end. Omitting the interchapters from the discussion and
understanding of the novel bars our access to the systemic grasp of the matters. It
leads to the suppression of a much needed social awareness that Steinbeck’s social
novel, precisely through its innovative emphasis on and use of documentary
interchapters, helps to meticulously build up while disclosing the basic operating
mechanisms of the agricultural system under capitalism by systematically expos-
ing forms of systemic exploitation and oppression facing farm workers.

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Note: The author acknowledges the financial support of the Slovenian Research Agency (research
core funding No. P6–0265).

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