Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...

Ma Joad: Oh, Tommy, they'd drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casy.

Tom Joad: They'd drag me anyways. Sooner or later they'd get me for one thing if not for another. Until then...

Ma Joad: Tommy, you're not aimin' to kill nobody.

Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain't it. It's just, well as long as I'm an outlaw anyways... maybe I can do somethin'... maybe I can just find out somethin', just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that's wrong and see if they ain't somethin' that can be done about it. I ain't thought it out all clear, Ma. I can't. I don't know enough.

Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom Joad: Well, maybe it's like Casy says. 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, then...

Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?

Tom Joad: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Ma Joad: I don't understand it, Tom.

Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about.

And no way is Henry Fonda a good Tom Joad. It is my favorite book.

Hell, John Steinbeck loved the movie and said that Henry Fonda as Tom Joad made him "believe my own words".

Ford nailed the film; for a 1940 B&W film, it was a masterpiece.

I've read the book at least a half dozen times in the last four decades and always see and read something new each time. Perhaps I am ready to read it again.

I started reading Steinbeck at such an early age that I had to hide it from most adults. So many of his books were considered scandalous at the time. But he could write characters like nobody else. Consider 'The Wayward Bus'. Most of those people would easily escape notice in everyday life, but Steinbeck made them memorable. He had a profound effect on my own life.

The only film of the era that I found comparable was the original 'Salt of the Earth'. I think there's been a remake, but I'm not interested. 'Norma Rae' and 'Matewan' were later favorites, too. Beginning to see a trend here?

Sorry, that book totally lost me when it marched into a dark area. I understand Steinbeck was experiencing a dark period in his life when he wrote it.

That said, 'East of Eden' was the first Steinbeck I read, and it totally hooked me. I hadn't realized adults understood such matters.

The film did less for me than the book. A killjoy, I am.

after he ratted to the HUAC.

TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

...

“Behind the harrows, the long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted
for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.”

That was my favorite part, although I couldn't quote it perfectly from memory.

Offer them money....