John Ford and the One Big Soul: "The Grapes of Wrath"

"Maybe," says Tom Joad at the end of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, "a fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody."

By this point in the film, Joad (played by Henry Fonda) has come face to face with his doom: he has seen his family farm taken away by the impersonal forces of a distant bank; has driven across the country with death cutting down the members of his family one by one; has discovered that California – the promised land where a man can work an honest day for an honest wage – is overrun by feudal farmers and their in-pocket sheriffs who are happy to work men, women and children to death for a profit; has seen his best friend murdered for organizing a strike and has in turn murdered his friend's murderer; and has realized that as a result of this crime he will be forever sundered from his family – he will leave to prevent them from being harmed by association with him and, because they are migrant laborers, will never be able to find them again.

His response to this is not to despair but to believe. He finds in his fate a token of desperate, mythic unity: the one big soul that belongs to everybody. The line is a precursor to a far more famous bit – he goes on to say that he won't really be gone, but will be out there forever as a kind of avenging angel of the poor and oppressed – but it's the idea of the one big soul that lies at the heart of the film, and of the Steinbeck novel on which it's based.

This notion of a single connected soul lies at a great distance from our contemporary politics. And one does not have to buy into it to make a film that engages in a critical way with American society: neither Night of the Living Dead nor Moonlight, to choose examples more or less at random, are much interested in the notion of a mythical body politic of the oppressed. But one cannot, I think, understand much about American society, or the social politics of American film, without thinking through this notion.

One of the most notable elements of The Grapes of Wrath is how deeply American its story is. This is not to say it's the only American story, simply that it's one of many that are intimately wound through the history of American life.

This story goes as follows. Tom Joad is a ne’er-do-well, a felon who killed a man in a drunken fight. On his release from prison he goes home to find that his family farm has been repossessed by the forces of capital. The term is used specifically, rather than provokingly, here: the Joad farm, along with the others in what will come to be called "the dust bowl," have been lost not due to the actions of an evil person, but because of the implacable needs of money invested in a bank, for which making loans to farmers is simply a way of finding a return. When asked who's responsible for the farmers losing their farms, the representative of the bank replies, wholly accurately: "It ain't nobody. It's a company."

Their future seeming hopeless, the Joads do what Americans have often done: strike out toward some new, opening part of the country – here the mythical land of California – where they can make a new life for themselves. They load up a truck with all their belongings and climb aboard as a motley but intimately connected group: Tom, his parents (played by Russell Simpson and the incomparable Jane Darwell), grandparents, his younger siblings, and a family friend – an ex-preacher named Jim (John Carradine). The trip is arduous. Grandpa and Grandma die along the way. The Joads are despised by many of the people they meet because they're poor, although here and there they do find flickers of a deeper American generosity of spirit.

When they finally make it to California they realize that the conditions they've known, both back home in Oklahoma and on the road, are not anomalies but constants. The Depression has thrown millions of people out of work and the large California farmers – like the banks – are just trying to make a profit. The Joads end up in a migrant workers camp patrolled by capriciously violent sheriffs, competing against other impoverished workers to see who will offer their services for the lowest wage. Jim is killed by a strike breaker, and Tom kills the strike breaker.

In the end, the Joads do find a glimmer of light. A government-run camp offers cleanliness and stability – it's run by the residents and offers things like weekly dances that help make life pleasant. It's against this backdrop that Tom delivers his speech about the one big soul. And although he can't remain with his family, the film closes with the suggestion that it’s this big soul, this possibility of a national connection, that will in the end save America. "That's what makes us tough," says Ma Joad in the film's final scene. "Rich fellas come up and they die and their kids ain't no good, and they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. And we'll go on forever, because we're the people."

The movie burns with an incandescent fury about the state of the country during the Depression, about the degradation of poverty, and about the way human beings are treated both by each other and by the larger systems they create. In these things, it goes to the heart of the question of what it means to make a political film in America.

A part of this question of political filmmaking revolves around the continuing echoes of the Joad's story through American history. The scenes of farmers losing their homes and land to the bank are eerily reminiscent of the 2008 mortgage crisis, for example, and the film's vision of poverty-wage agricultural work is uncomfortably prescient for anyone familiar with the way fruit is still picked in California or meat is processed in the Midwest (and one has only to read Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, from 1906, to discover how deeply the foundations of these structures are set).

The film's presentation of the continuing devastation of the modernization of agriculture is also spot-on. Travel to Iowa or Minnesota in 2020, and you will see small town after small town depopulated because of the fact that one person in a piece of massive machinery can manage the land it used to take ten or a hundred people to farm; the inundation of the Midwest by capital has also continued apace since the film was made, with massive corporations controlling everything from seed production to crop distribution channels, and increasingly trying to buy the land itself as an investment opportunity.

These American echoes extend also to the political aspects of the film's vision. Migrant workers, many of them immigrants, have long been seen as both necessary and despised in this county; necessary because they'll "do the jobs that no on else will do," but despised because they are poor and have accents. Similar resonances run through the film's understanding of population movements in our country. From the centuries-long promise of prosperity lying Westward, to the great migrations of black Americans into the industrial cities of the north in the decades after the Civil War, to the contemporary boom and bust population surges in towns from Wyoming to Pennsylvania as people chase work on natural gas fields, there has long been a promise in this country (realized or not) that if one is willing to uproot oneself and work hard, one can find prosperity.

Finally, the film's presentation of social unrest (protesting, in contemporary terms) and the role of law enforcement in putting down this unrest seems decidedly germane in 2020, as it has, unfortunately, throughout this country's history. From labor strikes to slave rebellions, violent confrontations between the powerful and powerless have existed for as long as America has been around.

John Ford's vision of all this in The Grapes of Wrath is certainly bleak, and not everyone will agree with it. One can argue that the injustices he's concerned with here are definitional to America, or that they are aberrations in what is, in actuality, a sustained march into the kind of prosperity and standard of living that have never been achieved in the history of the world; what one cannot argue, I think, is that they are not components of American life. That is to say, if one wants to think about American history, politics, and society, one cannot avoid thinking about the strands of injustice depicted in The Grapes of Wrath: human value pitted against the pursuit of profit, the movement of people in search of a better life, the economic forces of modernity, and the forces that drive us to act inhumanely toward one another.

But Ford also presents – here, and in virtually all of his films – a counterweight. This is his vision of the one big soul.

One of Ford's metaphors for this soul is the community dance, which is a sequence he works into many of his movies, and his Westerns in particular. (The question of the ways in which The Grapes of Wrath functions as a Western is something we'll have to think through another time.) In any case, it's one of these dances that provides the setting for the final confrontation in the movie. This takes place at the pleasant, government-run camp at which the Joads find refuge. The local farmers, not liking the fact that the camp provides comfort for workers, come up with a plan: they’ll send in some toughs to start a fight, which will give the sheriffs a chance to raid the camp. In the end, though, the plan fails. A sympathetic farmer tips off the workers, who whisk the toughs away before any commotion can be started.

The scene encapsulates a good deal of Ford's positive vision. A dance in Ford's world is a metaphor for the highest expression of civilization – joyful and communal – and thus for the highest expression of American life. Laughing, romancing, and enjoying the company of one's fellow human beings – these are the reasons for toiling, for uprooting oneself in search of a better life. This is explicitly contrasted in the film with the search for profit: the toughs and sheriffs who want to break up the dance are motivated by nothing other than the attempt to make money. This is the crux of the social conviction of the film. Instead of a nation founded on the miserable specter of margin-hunting, Ford sees a nation which operates on the same set of goals and principles as does a family. Strength comes from solidarity, and joy comes from community, rather than wealth.

It is worth noting here (at risk of rhapsodizing at too great a length) that Ford's vision of all this is fully integrated with his style as a filmmaker. He is, visually and structurally, a classicist. One of the best explorations of this term I know comes from E. H. Gombrich's book The Story of Art (which, incidentally, should be on the shelf of every young person in America; our country would be a far more humane place if it were.) Talking about the tradition of Greek art we have come to think of as classical, Gombrich again and again notes that it's a style based on simplicity, grace, beauty and above all harmony. This is about searching for equilibrium between an "adherence to rules and a freedom within the rules" (here meaning the formal rules of artistic composition) and through this search finding a point at which the "typical and the individual [become] poised in a new and delicate balance."

In The Grapes of Wrath a good deal of credit for this must go to the extraordinary cinematographer Gregg Toland, but it was also Ford's method throughout his career. His storytelling relies heavily on visual composition; this in turn is based on an absolute and unvarying dedication to orderliness and beauty in framing. The images he puts on the screen are never haphazard, and because of their precision they give his films an almost mythical feel. They are able to, in Gombrich's terms, create a sensation that we are at once watching specific individuals and larger than life characters, archetypes that stand in for the rest of us. And this provides, of course, the foundation of his one big soul idea: though his classicism he forwards the idea that what we are watching is somehow representative of all our stories, all our human struggles.

To return to the rather large claim I made at the outset, I don't think that one has to agree with Ford about any or all of this in order to make politically or socially engaged films in America. In fact, the disagreement over the existence of – and even the idea of – one big American soul seems to lie at ground zero of a good deal of our contemporary politics. The idea that this soul includes everyone is criticized from the left (in things like their arguments that it excludes Americans who happen not to be male, white, etc.) and the idea that it should include everyone is criticized from the right (in things like their attempts to prevent certain groups from fully participating in civic life).

But I do think that, in terms of making and talking about movies, and perhaps in terms of contemplating the larger body politic, one cannot cogently assess our history without at least trying to grapple with the American vision of the unifying power of the people as pitted against the "rich fellas," and with the deep connection of artistic technique to political belief necessitated by the attempt to put this vision on the screen.

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