Tobacco Road was published seven years before John Steinbeck’s definitive novel about the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath. In light of the fact that Steinbeck’s novel was made into an iconic film and has essentially never left America’s educational curricula, it may surprise modern audiences to realize that in those years prior to the appearance of the Joad family, the Lester clan was the pre-eminent fictional portrait of the economic ravages which gave rise to the financial collapse head around the world
The Dust Bowl compelled the Joads to go west with young men, old women and children, but the Dust Bowl was not the result of a weather phenomenon alone. The mechanics of agriculture and economics hurt the once fertile soil which had allowed the ancestors of people like the Joad to at the very least eke out a living. Things don’t necessarily get better for the Joads in California, but the novel ends on a notoriously hopeful image. In fact, despite the desperation that results in lives lost and ruined, it is safe to say that the pilgrimage of the Joads to the Pacific is a novel imbued with hope for the future.
Tobacco Road, by contrast, is relentlessly pessimistic. Then again, the Lester family ain’t the Joad family, either. The extraordinary pessimism which embues Tobacco Road inexorably leads toward what could be termed the exact opposite of the ending of The Grapes of Wrath. That final image achieved its infamy as the result of a young woman breastfeeding a staring adult male to make literal the suggestion of the “milk of human kindness.” To put it bluntly, Tobacco Road questions the entire premise of the existence of the milk of human kindness in the universe. Like the Oklahoma soil which no longer proves fertile enough to withstand the perfect storm resulting in the Dust Bowl, the Georgia farm that once provided bounty to the Lester family has grown barren. The sterile and desolate conditions are also a result of agricultural economics as much as the human frailty of the inheritors of the estate. Conditions conspire to push the remarkably fecund character—in his way abominable way at least as memorable as Tom Joad—to pursue alternate means of “saving the farm” when fertilizer proves out of monetary reach.
While the fiery narrative of The Grapes of Wrath ends on that poetic image of Rose-of-Sharon sharing her mother’s milk, Tobacco Road literally ends with a conflagration resulting from economic necessity. Jeeter follows a long tradition of dealing with such conditions by setting fire to his land with the purpose of creating new growth beneath the burn. In the pessimistic vision of Erskine Caldwell, however, this can only go wrong for Jeeter. And, indeed, not just for him, as he and his wife both suffer the consequences of what might well have turned into a positive.
But probably not. Before the reader makes to the point at which Jeeter at long last makes a desperate and good-hearted attempt to save his land, far more notorious images await. For its time, Tobacco Road skirted the edges of the provocative in order to present a distinctly oppositional view to that which would become the more beloved portrait of hard times in the Great Depression. What Caldwell succeeds in doing in this novel is showing the worst aspects of human nature as they face the seemingly impossible odds of ever getting back which their generations lost. The Lester family was certainly not the descendants of families like the Wilkes and O’Haras in Gone with the Wind, but those which came before Jeeter had it far better. Tobacco Road lost its grip on the American public—a grip which produced an adaptation that was at one thing the longest-running stage play in Broadway’s history—with the arrival of the Joads. The Joads are everything we want to think we’ll be in the face of the brutal effects of economic dislocation
For many, however, the Lesters are almost certainly a more accurate portrait.
