Excellent view of hard times; book/movie very influential in effects

Rating: 10/10 (7 April 2011)

The "Grapes of Wrath" film is a somewhat simplified version of Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning book about an Oklahoma tenant farmer family in the Dust Bowl days. After being evicted from the land they'd farmed for generations, they join many other Okie families migrating to California seeking opportunities to work. In California the Okies were often taken advantage of by affluent land owners who promised fair wages but then paid half what they promised. Those migrants who resisted exploitation were sometimes viewed (and treated) as "reds"; local police (or private security agents) were too often used to intimidate or quell resistance.
Steinbeck's criticism of such exploitation of workers led to banning the book in some places although it became quite popular through most of the US and led to reforms. Henry Fonda's role as Tom Joad earned his stardom; Jane Darwell (as Ma Joad) won a deserved Oscar for best supporting actress as did John Ford for directing.
Steinbeck was very critical of an economic system that allowed such mistreatment of sharecroppers and tenant farmers by wealthy land owners, bankers, etc., (supported by local officials wherever the owners/bankers resided). But while the movie piles worst case on worst case, IMO it's a fair view of how bad things sometimes got in the Great Depression era (1929-40).
I spent 2 summers (1949, 1950) in the Bootheel of Missouri working in communities of former sharecroppers who'd been evicted from their jobs and their shack homes in circumstances parallel to that of the Okie families. These evictions happened when the owners of the cotton plantations, after receiving federal agricultural subsidies for NOT growing cotton, decided to keep all the money for themselves by evicting their farm families (January, 1939), making thousands homeless.
The tenant farmer/sharecropper system was based on the land owners providing substandard housing to farm families plus advancing them credit (in their company stores) for food, clothing, and seed. In return the farm families planted, tilled, and picked the cotton. But their share of return from the cotton harvest was never sufficient to get out of debt to the store. The system made the farm families, in essence, indentured servants. Until they were kicked out.
While the motivations (land owners' greed, farm families' struggles to survive in extreme circumstances) and conflicts were very similar to what the Okies experienced, the resolution of this Bootheel crisis became far more uplifting and inspiring than the struggles without victors presented in the "Grapes of Wrath." But almost certainly, the popularity of this book and movie helped lead to such a different outcome in the Bootheel only a few years later.
This video describes the Bootheel situation: http://www1.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=148227
By Googling "Sharecroppers Strike" and "Cotton Patch Moses" you'll find a number of links that describe this Bootheel crisis, its conflicts, significant people, and outcomes.