Word: joads
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...central figures are the large Joad family, Oklahoma sharecroppers, who lose their 40-acre farm to the bankers, sell their possessions for $18 to gyp agents, buy an ancient jalopy for $75 from racketeers, head out on Highway 66 for the land of plenty promised in a come-on California handbill. With them - the 13th passenger -goes lanky, philosophizing Preacher Casy, hillbilly Moses turned rustic socialist. Hero of the Joads is tall, homely son Tom, a paroled convict. Heroine is Ma Joad, strong, patient, dreaming of "a white house with oranges growin' around...
...pleasant period in a Government camp, a self-governing oasis unloved by big absentee growers. Before the season is out, Rose of Sharon's young husband has deserted, her baby is born dead in a filthy tent, Tom is in hiding for killing a vigilante. But Ma Joad says: "We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on-changin' a little, maybe, but goin' right...
Despite these scarehead advance notices, the Freethinkers' meeting resulted in no rows, attracted 900 people, deist or otherwise, who felt in safe enough company with such speakers and endorsers of the congress as H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, C. E. M. Joad. G. D. H. Cole, J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Edouard Herriot, Somerset Maugham. Typical subjects for discussion at the meetings: Science and the Churches; Youth, the Schools and Free Thought; Present Religions Reaction and the Menace of the Vatican...
...superman made the airplane," observed Professor Joad, "but the ape has got hold of it. To step on foot throttles, insert coins into metal slots, scan headlines, crowd through clicking turnstiles, turn on the radio, hurl ourselves over the surface of the earth in a mechanism propelled by petrol-these constitute the modern notion of entertainment...
Though he thus flinches from the hurly-burly of modern life, Philosopher Joad is no pantywaist philosopher. Three years ago, when he witnessed the first firewalk performed in England (TIME, Sept. 30, 1935); newshawks asked him, as a well-known student of psychic phenomena, what he thought of the feat. Scholar Joad, taking a leaf from the book of George Bernard Shaw, who charges $1 a word for answering questions, said he could make no observations unless he was paid five guineas...