Tom Joad's The Okies And Isolation

One could argue that the people of the western United States would never consider the arguments made in The Communist Manifesto due to their patriotism and their ignorance of the national economical issues. This assumption is false, however, because some of the farmers had already thought similar ideas to what is in The Communist Manifesto, and the document would only organize and put their own thoughts into words. One example of this would be Tom Joad’s idea to have “them people [get] together and says, ‘let ‘em rot.’ Wouldn’ be long ‘fore the price went up, my God!” (Steinbeck, 317). This is referring to collectively unifying the farmers to, in a way, overthrow the landowners, which is a very big goal described in The Communist Manifesto.

This is well explained by Edwin T. Bowden in his essay, “The Okies and Isolation”. Here he explains that “there are plenty of “others” to hold the Okies in isolation. Sometimes they act out of the brutality and hatred born of fear, as the depties who destroy the Hooverville camps. Sometimes they act out of selfishness and desire for personal gain, as the orchard owners who break up the strike against starvation wages,” (Bowden, 71). This shows the tension between the tenant farmers and the authorities. In several places in The Grapes of Wrath, there are examples of this fear coming out to harm the Okies into submission. One instance of this appears when a third person narrator explains that “ the owners hated [the Okies] because the owners knew they were soft and the Okies strong, that they were fed and the Okies hungry; and perhaps the owners had heard from their grandfathers how easy it is to steal land from a soft man if you are fierce and hungry and armed. The owners hated them,” (Steinbeck, 300). This awareness of the potential threat brought with the Okies and other farmers was a large source of the persecution shown to the lower class in 1930’s California. The landowners were rightly afraid of the large sum of starving farmers that had accumulated over the decade. Luckily for them, these