Law vs. Fairness

In “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck, the Joad family has one goal: to stay alive by getting some work. They were one of many families from Oklahoma moving towards California after they had their land taken from them. The whole country was suffering from the Depression and many people were going to California hoping to get jobs doing whatever they could, even for as little as twenty cents an hour. The most powerful thing about the Joad’s journey to find work is that some things they had to do were illegal. But the main question for this story is: Is what’s legal and illegal the same thing as what is fair and not fair?

The first major time this question comes up is early on in the story. Tom Joad left jail on parole. Since he was being paroled, that means that he wasn’t allowed to leave the state, but when he went to see his family, he found out that they were packing up to go to California from where they were then, which was Oklahoma. His family consisted of his parents Pa and Ma, his uncle John, his grandparents Grandpa and Grandma, and his siblings Ruthie, Al, Noah, Winfield, and Rosasharn who is married to Connie. They all needed money for food, but they had no way in Oklahoma of making it, so they were going to have to move. This posed an issue for Tom: should he stay in Oklahoma and obey the law but risk his chance of never seeing his family again? Or should he go with them illegally, and risk the chance of getting in a lot of trouble if he was caught? He decided to do the illegal thing and go with his family. This may have been illegal, but it definitely seems fair for him to go with his family. He should not have to be separated from his family just because he has to follow a parole rule.

Another time this question comes up is when Tom’s grandfather died. They had already been on the road for a while, and then all of a sudden the grandfather just got sick and died. The whole family was very grief-stricken, but they had to come to a choice. Let the family bury another family member illegally, or bury him properly and legally and spend a lot of their money. Again they take the illegal choice, but that choice still seems pretty fair. Obviously one should be able to bury their own relative and not have to hand over the corpse along with forty or so dollars (which was a lot back then) to have him dumped in the ground and covered in dirt. It’s really sad how they had to bury the grandfather out in the middle of nowhere, and how he never was able to go and see the beautiful California. It’s also quite sad what the world had come to in those days, and how unfair a lot of the laws were that people had to follow.

Finally, one more time the question comes up is when the Joad family plus Jim Casy (who came along when he met up with Tom who was on his way home) were in Hooverville. They hadn’t been at Hooverville, which was basically just a small area to the side of the road where people had been living, for long when some guy came in a car with a deputy and asked if people wanted work. Well, when someone started to backtalk the guy, the deputy threw him in jail and then Tom got mad because they had practically no reason at all for arresting him. But then the “outlaw” started to escape and Tom helped him out, but the deputy ended up trying to shoot the “outlaw” and ended up shooting an innocent woman instead. The question is: was it fair for Tom to help or not? It seems like it was pretty fair because the “outlaw” was arrested just for talking in a way the business man didn’t like, but he has freedom of speech. Yet, when the business man complained to the deputy about the “outlaw”, the deputy said he had seen him making trouble before when he probably hadn’t. It hardly seems business-like of that businessman and deputy to do that to that “outlaw”, so shouldn’t Tom be able to help him escape? The answer should be yes.

“The Grapes of Wrath” really portrays what people had to deal with back in the Depression, and if something that was legal or illegal was also fair or unfair. If all men are created equal, as it was written in the Constitution, then doesn’t that mean that fairness and the law are equal? Since the law obviously overrides fairness in this book, does that mean that the people who work for the law are better than the people who do what they think is fair?