 Mr. John Gallagher, Rosemann Reis-Bullman's department, and Rosemann Gumbel's library, just going to read from The Graves of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The math teacher has to follow all these great English presenters. I hope I do. I hope I do myself, Joseph. So about love. So close your eyes. Imagine it's 1939. John Steinbeck has written The Graves of Wrath. It's received acclades with the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. It has also fueled political and public debate over the content of this book. It examines working class conditions. Opponents claim it exaggerates the plight of the poor. Some communities even burn this book. I traveled to California and Kerm County. I vote to 4 to 1. The commission bans grapes of wrath because of the unfavorable lights Steinbeck portrays. Landholders and stores go forward in time. It's 1980. A teenager gets in a fight with his parents, locks himself in his room for the weekend. He has nothing to do. He completes his freshman book for that month in three days and becomes hooked on reading. That was me. You can open your eyes and help me. 1980, I was a freshman in high school, and we got this. And it set me on a path that didn't know it at the time. I was raised in a fairly conservative political household. And I started reading people like Steinbeck and John Vos Pasos. And then I went south to the Latin American writers. So now I know fine that I'm so conservative, and maybe I won't say I'm liberal, but social justice is something that's always good. For those of you who haven't read it, this is set during the Great Depression. We're following a family from the Dustball region, westward to California, a place where they're hoping their dreams will come true. Their land has been taken away from them. It's been foreclosed by the bank. And we're going to follow them throughout this book in their economic hardships, their physical hardships, their grief. I chose several passages from chapter 19. It's just after their entry into the California. And the grandmother just dies as they sneak across the border. Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans, and a horde of tattered, feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they totaled. Mexicans were weak and fled. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land. Then with time, the squatters were no longer squatters. And their children grew up and had children on the land. And the hunger was gone for them, the feral hunger and gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green, thrusting grass, for the swelling roots. They had these things so completely that they did not know about them anymore. Then the dispossessed were drawn west from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes dusted out, tracked them out. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless. Restless as ants, scurrying fine work to do, to live, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut. Anything to burden the bear. For food, the kids are hungry. We got no place to live, like yet scurrying for work, for food, and most all, for land. We ate for them. Seven generations back, Americans, and beyond that, Irish, Scottish, English, German, one of our folks in the Revolutionary War. That was lots of our own folks in the Civil War, both sides. They were hungry, and they were fierce, and they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred. The owners hated them because the owners knew they were soft. But they were fed, and the yogis were hungry. And perhaps the owners had heard from their grandfathers how easy it is to steal land from a soft man. The owners hated them, and in the towns, the storekeepers hated them because they had no money to spend. There is no shorter path to a storekeeper's content, and all his aberrations were exactly opposite. The town men, little bankers, hated oaks because there was nothing to gain from them. Because a hungry man must work, the wage payer automatically gives him less for his work, and then no one can get no more. And the great owners must lose their land and enough people, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history, and to know the great fact when property accumulates in too few of hands is taken away. And the companion fact, when a majority of the people are hungry and cold, they will take by force working. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history, repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands. The number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent on arms for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murdering of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored. Plans for the change ignored. And only needs to destroy, revolt, or consider. While the causes of revolt, our people are good people. Our people are kind people. Pray God someday kind people won't all be poor. Pray God someday a kid can eat.