“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe” (Douglass). In Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl Age novel, The Grapes Of Wrath, protagonist Tom Joad, and his family are forced from their farm due to the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, believing to set out to refuge for California, along with many struggling migrant workers. Including the family, thousands of migrant workers are in search of jobs, land, and the hope for having a brighter future. Steinbeck also includes the aspect of characters who come along such as Jim Casy, whose characteristics rely on human unity and love as well as the need for cooperative rather than individualistic ideals during hard times. Steinbeck uses Jim Casy’s significant role to criticize society’s hunger and the crimes against humanity, where he brings up helpful ideas however society refuses to accept his ideology or his philosophies due to having the inability to adapt to new ideas, alienating Jim Casy from workers’ values of their culture but use that disadvantage to spark a plausible unity to keep migrant workers from salvation.
Jim Casy’s alienation from society is a distinction between his individualistic ideals the unadaptable migrant workers who wouldn’t foresee his ideals. Ideally, he holds the philosophy in which he believes, “You can’t hold no church with idears like