but when I shall have to — the American democracy will have disappeared

I am not surprised that the tireless meter maid of my writing would hold the fictitious Joads of The Grapes of Wrath, a destitute rural, farm family to blame for the urban terrorism that happened in the city of Tulsa for real, overlooking several facts, among them that if white, rural Oklahomans were to be held culpable for what those in Tulsa did to the Black residents, why stop at the Oklahoma border?  Why not every white person in the United States?  I mean the real ones, not the fictitious ones.  

In order to imagine the Joads of having some guilt in that you would have no recourse but to believe that their creator,  John Steinbeck, would have imagined them to have participated in or supported the white-establishment terror and murder attack on an urban Black population for real. Not all white residents of Tulsa did, some were attacked for sheltering Black servants who lived with them.  

It's a long, long time since I read The Grapes of Wrath, but I don't recall that content in the book nor, indeed, can I imagine John Steinbeck making such people the heroes of one of his books.   It is ironic that Steinbeck, one of the more unusually acute critics of negative stereotypes of Black People, especially in relation to that fountain of negative racial stereotype, Hollywood, would have his characters so distorted as in his request to have his name removed from the Hitchcock movie made of his script, The Lifeboat, he specifically objected to the undignified stereotype that the Black character had been made into instead of the "purposeful and dignified" character he had written.   

It is also especially stupid to suspect Steinbeck would have had that motive, considering his character Crooks, in Of Mice and Men is probably the fullest, most human, most dignified but also, as a human, flawed Black man written by a white writer of that time or most of the previous or subsequent fiction by white writers.  Steinbeck giving Crooks his flaws was to elevate him to full human status instead of the typical strategy of having such a character be unrealistically noble and saintly - a fiction within a fiction.  To think the writer of that character would have a back story of the Joads that would have them participate in the white terrorist attack on Greenwood years before Grapes of Wrath takes place is ridiculous. 

Or you could be so delusional that you believe fictitious characters have a real existence apart from what their authors imagine and intend them to be.  Like those people who can't distinguish between the characters people play on TV and the actors saddled with TV program fame. 

This article John Steinbeck on Racism and Bigotry, ironically begins:

In September of 1936, young John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) witnessed murderous riots in the streets of his Californian hometown — the result of a violent clash between the local lettuce growers and the migrant farm workers who had finally revolted against the inhumane conditions they had long endured. (Decades later, one such laborer would detail these horrific conditions in his conversation with Studs Terkel.) Animated by irrepressible compassion, Steinbeck set out to tell the migrants’ story and spent two years working on a manuscript titled L’Affaire Lettuceberg. But he held himself to so high a standard that he ultimately decided he had failed to live up to his humanistic duty and destroyed the manuscript — one of the most courageous acts for a creative person to perform.

He then started from scratch and embarked upon the most intense writing experience of his life thus far — a quest to give voice to these oppressed laborers, to celebrate the basic goodness and humanity of the so-called common people amid a culture than had tried over and over to dehumanize them. The result was his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (public library), published on April 14 of 1939, in which Steinbeck wrote:

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success … in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

Both populist and insurrectionist, both protest song and gospel, the book was instantly beloved by those who stood for equality and human rights, and instantly reviled by the Donald Trumps of the day, who saw it as a threat to the power structures that buoyed them.

And the irony, given the accusation against the Joads, increases as the article continues:

Steinbeck received a letter from a Reverend L. M. Birkhead, National Director of an organization called “Friends of Democracy,” claiming to combat Antisemitic, pro-Nazi propaganda. But Birkhead’s missive had a troubling undercurrent of bigotry. He asserted that The Grapes of Wrath had been called “Jewish propaganda” and implied that the only way to dispel such accusations would be for Steinbeck to prove that he is not Jewish — an accusation analogous to the conspiracy theories which “birthers” directed at President Barack Obama nearly a century later, stemming from the same soul-malady of which all bigotry is a symptom.

Steinbeck’s response to the Reverend, found in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public library), is a masterwork of moral wisdom and a sublime stance against bigotry, just as timely and perhaps — such is the tragedy of our time — even timelier today.

Steinbeck writes:

"Dear Mr. Birkhead:

I am answering your letter with a good deal of sadness. I am sad for a time when one must know a man’s race before his work can be approved or disapproved. It does not seem important to me whether I am Jewish or not, and I know that a statement of mine is useless if an interested critic wishes to ride a preconceived thesis… It happens that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish blood but it only happens that way. I find that I do not experience any pride that it is so.

If you wish — here is my racial map although you know what an intelligent anthropologist thinks of racial theories. As you will see, I am the typical American Airedale."

After outlining his genealogy, not without sarcastic jabs at the very notion that it is of any significance at all, Steinbeck adds:

"Anyway there it is. Use it or don’t use it, print it or not. Those who wish for one reason or another to believe me Jewish will go on believing it while men of good will and good intelligence won’t care one way or another. I can prove these things of course — but when I shall have to — the American democracy will have disappeared."

The Grapes of Wrath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year and became a cornerstone of Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize two decades later. It endures as a one of the most significant works of social justice ever written.

Complement the thoroughly fantastic Steinbeck: A Life in Letters — the source of his timeless wisdom on falling in love and the art of the friend breakup — with the story of how the beloved writer used the diary as a tool of discipline and an antidote to self-doubt as he was writing The Grapes of Wrath.

I find it incredible that someone could hold college credentials and not bother to find out these things before they say such stupid things.   Though I'm not that surprised that a city boy wouldn't understand that the people who attacked and massacred the Black residents of Greenwood were city boys, certainly some of them inspired to join the resurgent KKK inspired by the movie he holds blameless for that,  Birth of a Nation.   The "great film's" impact in encouraging the rebirth of that extremely dangerous white terrorist group in America, not only in the former Confederacy but throughout the country is well documented, as I said earlier here, it was Hollywood promoting the racism that the movie industry has hardly shed.  And its refounding and it's promotion throughout the country was primarily city based.   From The History of the Klu Klux Klan in Olkahoma, by Carter Blue Clark

The motion picture The Birth of a Nation did much to rekindle the romantic image of the mission of hooded men in the night. Oklahomans went enthusiastically to view the movie when i t showed initially in 1915 through 1916, and they attended its reshowings in 1924. Kleagles adroitly used the movie and the novel from which the movie was made as a kind o f recruitment device. The impact of the new cinematic techniques o f director D, W, Griffeths highlighted the electrifying novel of Thomas Dixon, The Clansman.  It left the viewing audience with a sensitive
impression of the alleged depravities of newly emancipated blacks and carpetbag governments yielding to no power except the force  of the begowned Knights.

I will break in here to point out that the description is of the racist fiction of the novel and movie, a necessary thing to point out since even so many college-credentialed Americans are unable to understand the firm line between the inherent lies told about history in such fiction and reality, part of the power of lies, what makes allowing them so dangerous.

The efforts the Radical Republican Austin Stoneman (Thaddeus Stevens) to Africanize the South all but succeeded on the screen before the Klan stepped in to save white civilization from bestial barbarity to the strains of The Ride of the Valkeries  from the orchestra pit.  Actress Lillian Gish at the last minute was rescued from the evil clutches of Stoneman and of Reconstruction and returned to the tranquility of brocade and verandas under the watchful eye of the ghostly legions of the Klan.

Given that description of the action of the movie that reignited and spread the KKK, it should be remembered that, as so often was the case, that the excuse the white racists used to incite the attacks on the Black community in Tulsa was a black teenaged boy supposedly touching a white woman in an elevator.  The incident is variously reported but what seems to me most believable is that he tripped as he was going into an elevator and he may have touched a woman who was already in the elevator by accident.   Hollywood is very likely the source of tinder that was set off in the imaginations of racists who burned down Greenwood and murdered so many Black People.  It is ironic that the far different Hollywood product, the movie of The Grapes of Wrath - I doubt he read the book as I doubt more college-credentialed Americans have read the book as saw the movie - would not be seen as having a much different motive from the "great film" of the racist who made the movie or the racist lies in the novel it was inspired by.   

You can criticize Steinbeck for a lot of things, like even his admirable characters, he had his own, serious human flaws, but that use of him is as unfair as it is lunatic, especially considering how unusual he was for his time.