The American West in Red and Green: The Forgotten Literary History of Social Justice Environmentalism

Abstract

John Steinbeck’s notorious description of the bank’s raping tractor offers a remarkable concatenation of elements, as the central image closely links several of the legacies of pioneering in the American West: the industrial development of Western agriculture under capitalism, the exploitation and displacement of farming families like the Joads, and the despoliation of the environment. Steinbeck’s explicitly ecological worldview, developed with biologist Ed Ricketts and most clearly articulated in Log from the Sea of Cortez, embraced the idea of interrelation itself as a fundamental concept, an emphasis that made him perhaps the best suited of all writers on the American left to record how environmental and human exploitation converge in the postfrontier West. But while Grapes of Wrath is sometimes regarded as a text almost unique in its participation in both proletarian and environmentalist traditions in American literature, in fact a surprising number of proletarian novels written during the first half of the twentieth century also included a strong environmental emphasis. In this essay, brief analyses of several proletarian novels will reveal the literary left’s unexpectedly deep investment in discourses of the environment and demonstrate that the idea of nature, and particularly Western nature, played a central conceptual role in the work of many writers on the left.

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. … He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor—its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades. … Behind the harrows, the long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. … The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (49)

Portions of this essay also appear in Steven Rosendale’s City Wilderness: US Radical Fiction and the Forgotten Literary History of Social Justice Environmentalism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, forthcoming).