Google “Bernie Sanders-Georgetown University” for proof that John Steinbeck still matters. Sanders, the progressive Senator from the State of Vermont who is running for President of the United States, echoed Steinbeck’s greatest novel and channeled Franklin Roosevelt, Steinbeck’s favorite President, during a passionate speech to students at Georgetown University on November 19. Advertised as “Sanders on socialism,” the hour-long address called for the enactment of an “economic bill of rights” for all Americans, first envisioned in 1944 by Franklin Roosevelt in a speech delivered not long before Roosevelt died. In it Roosevelt said that true freedom requires economic security for everyone: the right to a decent job at a living wage, adequate housing, and guaranteed healthcare. Sanders agrees, adding freedom from corrupt campaign financing to Roosevelt’s litany of change. Steinbeck, a lifelong Democrat, met Franklin Roosevelt on several occasions, and Eleanor Roosevelt became an ally and, later, a friend. But in 1944 Steinbeck felt disappointed with America and depressed about the future. His experience reporting from Italy on World War II shook him badly, his domestic life was a mess, and his best period as a writer of socially conscious fiction lay in the past. His siblings were Republicans and he was trying to go home again.
Bernie Sanders, the progressive Senator from the State of Vermont who is running for President of the United States, echoed Steinbeck’s greatest novel and channeled Franklin Roosevelt, Steinbeck’s favorite President, during a passionate speech to students at Georgetown University on November 19.
Still, Steinbeck’s writing of the 1930s is evidence that, if asked, he would have supported Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights in 1944. Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, dramatizes the same Depression-era America that Roosevelt described in his 1937 inaugural address as “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.” Sanders quoted Roosevelt’s 1937 line at Georgetown University, building his case on Roosevelt’s policies and employing statistics to back up his assertion that Americans are underemployed, over-incarcerated, and sicker than they should be, despite unprecedented national wealth. Alone among the current crop of candidates in either party, he views the growing gap between rich and poor as a moral outrage equivalent to the Great Depression, one that requires legislative remedy through political revolution. Sanders began his hour-long speech at Georgetown University in anger but closed in hope. He called for political revolution on the Franklin Roosevelt model, but he also gave shout-outs to Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon Johnson, and King Abdullah of Jordan in his position statements on foreign and domestic affairs. Judging by audience response, his listeners got the message, and his biggest applause lines were worthy of John Steinbeck: black lives matter, social injustice is evil, and immigrants make America strong.
“Corporate media” ranks high on Bernie Sanders’s list of oligarchies to be overthrown by breakup, along with Wall Street banks, drug manufacturers, and the billionaires who buy elections. As a result, the mainstream coverage of his campaign to date has been biased, misleading, and focused on surface rather than substance. Despite its depth and drama, his Georgetown University address—the most detailed articulation of his views so far—was no exception. News stories about the speech the next day were as scarce as copies of The Grapes of Wrath in Kern County, California. When TV talking heads deigned to mention Sanders’s revival of Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights, most mumbled “socialism” before moving on to friendlier content: Hillary Clinton’s emails, Donald Trump’s demand for the deportation of undocumented Mexicans, and Ted Cruz’s call for closing America’s borders to Muslims in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, Bernie Sanders’s campaign has stirred deep animosity within power structures that control the system. They hate being exposed, and as Steinbeck learned they fight back.
Like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, Bernie Sanders’s campaign has stirred deep animosity within power structures that control the system. They hate being exposed, and as Steinbeck learned they fight back.
They called Steinbeck a communist. Sanders, like Roosevelt, they dismiss as a socialist. A plum-toned aristocrat sometimes described as a traitor to his class, Roosevelt fought “economic royalists” from both parties and welcomed their scorn. Sanders, who comes from Brooklyn and faults Democrats for acting like Republicans, admires Roosevelt’s attitude and quotes him frequently, as he did at Georgetown University. Compared with Roosevelt, however, Sanders is a roughneck speaker who still sounds like a New Yorker. He said “crap” early in his remarks at Georgetown University and admitted that, like Steinbeck at Stanford, he didn’t apply himself as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s (see photo). In the 1950s Steinbeck supported Adlai Stevenson, a polished and erudite Illinois progressive who lost two elections to Dwight Eisenhower, a man with a vocabulary so limited that Steinbeck said it disqualified him from being President. During the period Bernie Sanders was demonstrating for desegregation rather than doing his homework at the University of Chicago, Steinbeck’s political affections moved on to Lyndon Johnson, an unpolished President who talked tough while reviving Roosevelt “socialism” in landmark legislation—civil rights, Medicaid, Medicare—that Sanders praised in his November 19 address. The dead no longer vote, but if Steinbeck were alive today I think his big heart would be with Bernie Sanders. Watch the video of Sanders’s Georgetown University speech and see if you agree:
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This sentence is an example of how you school us, Will: “Steinbeck, a lifelong Democrat, met Franklin Roosevelt on several occasions, and Eleanor Roosevelt became an ally and, later, a friend.” Because that detail explains much–Steinbeck was in close proximity to power and so his vision was one of an informed outlier who is in (and of) the world but also stands apart from it. This distinction sets up the whole argument: “They called Steinbeck a communist. Sanders, like Roosevelt, they dismiss as a socialist. A plum-toned aristocrat sometimes described as a traitor to his class, Roosevelt fought ‘economic royalists’ from both parties and welcomed their scorn. Sanders, who comes from Brooklyn and faults Democrats for acting like Republicans, admires Roosevelt’s attitude and quotes him frequently, as he did at Georgetown University.”
Brilliant work, yet again.
Will,
intriguing piece, and obviously both men of great compassion. But I gave up long ago trying to predict behavior, much less who might like whom. I do think, out of a bad lot of candidates, Steinbeck would have taken Sanders because most of the other choices are . . . what’s the word? . . . unappealing, if not scary.
In the early days of the 1960 presidential campaign there were few amongst those I knew or talked to on the Monterey Peninsula who favored seeing John F. Kennedy in the White House. We had recently gone through — in many cases survived — the tormented witch hunting years of Joseph McCarthy and the injustices of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Furthermore, we were on the threshold of a new Era of Scare fostered by the extreme rightwing politics of the John Birch Society and Barry Goldwater: “I could have ended the (Korean) war in a month. I would have made North Korea look like a mud puddle.”
There were a number of reasons why Kennedy wasn’t liked, the first being his father. A one-time liquor importer who’d profited handsomely selling his stashed warehouses of Gordon’s Gin and Haig & Haig during Prohibition, he’d been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James, London, by President Roosevelt, and it was there, during the height of the Blitz, with London in ruins, that he was to remark that “Democracy is finished in England, and it may be in the U.S. as well.”
Then there was Kennedy’s campaign manager, brother Robert, who was not the man we think of today as a crusader for minorities and a spokesman for the African-American Civil Rights Movement. In 1960 we were remembering him as a one-time Assistant Council on one of Joseph McCarthy’s investigative committees that had spent the previous five years digging into the private lives of innocent citizens with a will to discredit and destroy them. We knew, too, that Joseph McCarthy had been a long-time Kennedy family friend and was the godfather of one of Robert’s daughters. When he left McCarthy’s committee, Robert was quoted as saying “I continue to maintain a great fondness for the man.”
We who were living in Monterey at that time, in that age of Howl and On The Road, of Ginsburg and Kerouac, of Dennis Murphy and Henry Miller, of the Beatniks and North Beach, of Monterey’s First Jazz Festival, of poetry and jazz music in a dozen or more bars and coffeehouses, we found it difficult to want to cheer for a Kennedy running for president. We were a cynical, perhaps apolitical bunch, and unlike those among us who had, in a previous era, supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry A. Wallace, we sat on our hands and didn’t give a damn.
A pox on both your houses, we thought, and we did nothing until those who had lived through the long years of the Great Depression, those who had been close to John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, reminded us of the past. Talking about “the old days,” they said it could happen again, but what really lit the fuse under us and sent us up and down the streets knocking on doors in support of Kennedy was their very genuine concern that our apathy was going to give Nixon the win.
Would Steinbeck have supported Bernie Sanders? Of course he would. Like his Monterey friends, he’d kick our butts and remind us of the alternatives.
Thank you for invaluable information and insight into the historic election of 1960 from “eyes on the ground” in Monterey. I’m glad you concur about Steinbeck and Sanders in 2016. Like you, I remember the apathy that fed the 1960 results, thought from the experience of a boy growing up in North Carolina who heard more complaints about JFK’s religion that about his father or brother. In a way, I’m surprised Catholic Monterey folks weren’t more vocal in supporting Kennedy, though Steinbeck remarked that he came from Republican country (Monterey included) and speculated that he would have been a Republican, too, if he’d stayed in Salinas. His dislike of Ike and disgust with Nixon are evident in his letters, and the thought crossed my mind that Nixon’s victory in 1969 couldn’t have helped his health, since he died within weeks of the election. In the interest of full disclosure (though it’s already obvious to readers of my opinion piece), I’ve voted Democrat in every cycle since 1968, my first election. But this is the first time I’ve gotten excited about a candidate this early. Bernie Sanders is like lightning, and I’ve been struck.
Thanks, Will, for a timely editorial grounded in history. Only Senator Bernie Sanders seems to understand the revolution needed to bring democracy and President Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms to fruition nearly 75 years after his speech of advocacy for them:
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way— everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.”
To this end he proposed a United Nations, which languishes as we wage war nearly at will, declaring that this president or world leader must go.
Steinbeck, in the main, was politically astute and grounded in the moral universe, and might well have supported the candidacy of Bernie Sanders as what would be best for most Americans. Unfortunately none of the other candidates are as free from the entanglements of corporate and military influence as Senator Sanders. The Republicans are frightening in their lies and proclivities toward racism, sexism, elitism based on wealth, even fascism. Secretary Clinton is compromised by the banking industry and Wall Street and the military. While she likely would not be as bad as the GOP, only Bernie is vested in creating a more democratic “democracy,” a system to benefit working Americans, just as Steinbeck favored and labored to tell the stories of people beset by forces much like those we face today.
Thank for your thoughtful reminder about the details of FDR’s “four freedoms” domestic vision and your observations about contemporary power politics. But politics were ugly even then. weren’t they? While Roosevelt was charting his economic bill of rights, he was also acceding to the millionaire interests in his own party that wanted Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s progressive VP, kicked off the ’44 ticket in favor of a Southern conservative. The result was Harry Truman, a product of the notorious Kansas City political machine and proponent of the Cold War continued by Eisenhower, etc. Eugene Debs, Henry Wallace, Bernie Sanders–the true but thin progressive line of the past 100 years.
Yes, Will, agreed. It appears that Franklin Roosevelt relented somewhat after his first term, or the Great Depression might well have ended sooner. But he electrified the nation, directed the search that found the source of the Dust Bowl, and solved it with improved agricultural policies. Politics is always the art of the possible not the perfect.
Enjoyed your piece and the Sanders speech, especially now that the focus is on California as we head toward the convention. I found dialogue about “reds” in both the novel and film useful in addressing the attempts by Clinton surrogates like McCaskill to red-bait Sanders. I’m wondering whether “Grapes of Wrath” was demonstrably influential in shaping any of Roosevelt’s policy and whether he regarded it as his favorite novel. Same question applied to Sanders. Finally, it’s probably time to correct the name of the university in the headline. Thanks.
You are the first reader to point out our error in misidentifying Georgetown University in the title of this post. Thank you! As for your questions about the influence of Steinbeck’s novel on FDR and Sanders: New Deal policies and programs were already in place when Steinbeck wrote and the Roosevelts read “The Grapes of Wrath,” and the government camp described by Steinbeck in the book was an actual place that Steinbeck visited while researching the plight of migrant workers in California. Whether Bernie Sanders was influenced by Steinbeck or his novel is something for a sympathetic interviewer to ask someday. Perhaps during a future Georgetown (not George Washington) University stop!