Pat,

I don't agree. For me, the end of the book was extremely hopeful.

Why? Well, they were doing anything to survive and the hope was in that simple fact. If you recall, they had found an old migrant man, a stranger, starving and close to death. Rose Of Sharon had just lost her baby. Her husband had left her and the family. Tom was a fugitive and had needed to leave---for himself and for the safety of all. The family was disrupted and changing.
Yes, life for them had changed to the extent that it had become more like family life today than the life the family, had been used to in the past on the farm. The change was traumatic of course. The old ones died out for the most part. The rest went onward. To further the survival of the larger family, the community, Rose Of Sharon did an almost incomprehensible thing----she gave her life-sustaining milk---her dead baby's natural sustenance---her nourishing breast---to the old and feeble migrant man !

When given lemons, the Joads made lemonade! It's a great and vibrant, impactful and memorably shocking final scene. Much better than Ma Joad just announcing, "We'll suvive 'cause we're the people." (That was the film's ending to the swelling tones of "Red River Valley" as the Joads went West into the sunset. Often it takes an extraordinary gesture to get folks in the mindset to persevere---something like giving to a total stranger in the community.

It DOES take a village.

That is why instigating THE NEW DEAL, like Franklin Roosevelt and far-seeing others did, was the only way to go then. It was necessary at the time---and it was accomplished.

Is our prosperity now due to those measures taken during hard times---in spite of the wealthy status quo advocates protests about the decline of family values and the onset of the welfare state? Very probably from my point of view, just as the eradication the the negative aspects of the welfare state mentality is necessary for the betterment of the many.

I suspect I'm digressing or fanticyzing a lot when I see these outcomes as being possibly caused by the simple events at the end of The Grapes Of Wrath. But I still must say to those who decry the changes in families and in our "American system" that, if they can restrain themselves from acts like Ted Kazinsky's and the Oklahoma City bombings, the world will retain it's wondrousness and potentials in spite of their abhorance of change in itself. Again, as Franklin D. said, "There's nothing to fear but fear itself!" And fear of the good aspects of socialism and the Soviet experiment creeping into our society is mere fear itself rearing it's sad and ugly head. On the same note, the Russian fear of the good aspects of capitalism, aspects that do really exist in spite of totalitarian communist hardliners protests, is nothing more than a longing for the old days and another manifestation of the fear of fear itself.

Yep, I've digressed (and sorry for my terrible spelling). But it was fun to mentally project and extend these possible causialities.

And don't forget that Preacher Jim Casey's initials are J.C.---the same as Jesus Christ. And he was killed by the the police force of the powers-that-be after telling the police, "Look guys, you don't know what you're doing!" He spent most of the book wandering in the wilderness and searching for the truth of it--and trying to get his faith back.

What an amazing book!!!!!!

Art Thieme