The Harvest Gypsies. John Steinbeck
and The Grapes of Wrath, the camp experience is the one bright exception to an otherwise gloomy account. Only in the camps does Steinbeck portray the migrants as somewhat in control of their lives, surviving with some dignity and self-respect. But by themselves, the camps were little more than palliatives. In The Grapes of Wrath the Joads are forced to leave the almost idyllic atmosphere of “Wheatpatch Camp” to find work. “We hate to go,” Pa Joad explained. “Folks been so nice here-an’ the toilets an’ all. But we got to eat.” Beyond the camps, then, Steinbeck advocated establishment of a state agricultural labor board to protect and promote the migrants’ right to organize unions. Most important, he urged, federal and state authorities should begin a program of resettling the Okies on small family farms, perhaps on public land.
Both Steinbeck and Collins viewed the migrants as displaced Jeffersonian yeomen who needed and deserved their own small plots of land. Unfortunately, this ran counterto the whole direction of California agricultural history. The state’s rural economy had never been dominated by small, Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. Instead, the Gold Rush allowed commercial producers to grow cash crops for instant urban markets in San Francisco and the mining camps. Completion of the trans-continental railroad in 1869 promoted a wheat boom in the Central Valley with large “bonanza farms” producing for international markets. By the 1870s, though a majority of California farms were small or middle-sized operations, the bulk of agricultural output was produced by a relatively few very large farms, some controlled by San Francisco businessmen. The shift to intensive fruit, vegetable and other specialty crop cultivation in the late nineteenth century did little to change that situation. If corporate agribusiness is a fairly new phenomenon in most of the United States, in 1936, when Steinbeck and Collins first toured Central Valley fields, it was already an established fact of life in California.
“Bindlestiffs,” largely single, footloose men, made up most of the labor force of the great wheat farms of the 1870s and 1880s. But as the shift to fruits and vegetables increased the need for labor during the harvests and other intensive work periods, Chinese and other immigrants entered the farm labor market. Workers followed the varied crops up and down the state, creating the nation’s first modern migrant agricultural labor force. When federal immigration restrictions affected the supply of Chinese labor, growers turned to Japan, southern Europe and even India. When further restrictions affected these areas, attention shifted to Mexico and the Philippines.
By 1935 the great wave of dust bowl migration was displacing many, though by no means all, of the immigrant, non-white laborers in California fields. From 1935 to 1938, between 300,000 and 500,000 Okies arrived in California. Poverty, land foreclosures and drought forced them out of Lower Plains states such as Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and, of course, Oklahoma. Ironically, federal programs designed to help farmers also contributed to the migration. The government paid property owners to take land out of production, thus displacingthousands of unneeded tenant farmers and sharecroppers.
Steinbeck and Collins believed that the dust bowl migration was fundamentally transforming rural California society by changing the ethnic composition of the agricultural labor force. “Farm labor in California,” Steinbeck predicted, “will be white labor, it will be American labor, and it will insist on a standard of living much higher than that which was accorded the foreign ‘cheap labor.”’ In an editorial accompanying the series, the News agreed, arguing that the dust bowl migrants “are Americans of the old stock. . . . They cannot be handled as the Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos.” Neither Steinbeck nor the News stooped to the crude racist vocabulary so common to the era, but both in effect were contending that only white Americans could successfully resist conditions which had regularly been imposed on non-whites and immigrants. As Steinbeck put it, the new arrivals “will refuse to accept the role of field peon, with attendant terrorism, squalor and starvation.”
In fact, Okies proved less willing to organize and join unions than the Mexicans and Filipinos who had preceded them in California fields. The union organizing drives of largely immigrant workers in 193 3 and 1934, while ultimately failing, were far more successful than those of 1938 and 1939, when American-born Okies dominated the labor force. The dust bowl migrants still considered themselves independent farmers and found it difficult to give up their traditional rural individualism. When Tom Joad is urged to bring his family out on strike in The Grapes of Wrath, he replies, “Tonight we had meat. Not much but we had it. Think Pa’s gonna give up his meat on account of other fellas?” Later in the novel, the death of his friend at the hands of anti-labor vigilantes moves Tom to become a union organizer. In the end, however, little came of the ambitious efforts to organize either white or non-white agricultural workers in California during the 1930s.
The most important opponent of unionization was the Associated Farmers, Inc., an organization of leading growers and their powerful corporate allies. The Associated Farmers also opposed the federal migrant camp program, fearing that the settlements would become centers of union organizing activity. In addition, local townspeople often resisted the establishment of migrant camps in their areas, arguing the camp residents would place a burden on schools, relief programs and other community institutions. Tom Collins and other Resettlement Administration officials were acutely aware that the towns also harbored substantial prejudice against the migrants; in one Central Valley community the local movie theater required “Negroes and Okies” to sit in the balcony. In spite of such feelings, the Resettlement Administration and its successor the Farm Security Administration, eventually established fifteen California camps before the progam was liquidated after World War II. But even at their height in the late thirties, the settlements were still considered ‘’demonstration projects” and served only a small fraction of the migrant population.
John Steinbeck and Tom Collins were dedicated New Deal liberals, yet the camps were the only New Deal program designed specifically to serve California farm laborers. Agricultural workers were not covered by Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Act. The New Deal was primarily a political response to the Depression, and unlike farm employers, the migrants had little political clout. While California growers obtained federal price supports for some products, legally enforced marketing orders for others, and massive government expenditures for irrigation projects, migrant laborers received a small, poorly funded camp program that never got beyond the “demonstration” stage.
Steinbeck recognized the migrants’ political weakness and urged the establishment of a “militant and watchful organization” on their behalf. The group would be composed of “middle class people, workers, teachers, craftsmen and liberals,” and it would fight for farm workers’ rights against what Steinbeck called the “vigilanteism” and “fascism” of the Associated Farmers and its allies.
The Simon J. Lubin Society was exactly the kind of organization Steinbeck had in mind. Named for a progressive reformer who had fought for farm workers’ rights, the Lubin Society struggled mightily to assist the migrants’ cause. In 1938 Steinbeck allowed the group to publish his News articles in pamphlet form, under the title Their Blood is Strong. In the same year, he uncharacteristically let his name be used by a similar group, the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization, formed by Hollywood actress (and future memberof Congress) Helen Gahagan Douglas. But the Lubin Society and the John Steinbeck Committee were no match for the Associated Farmers. Its allies in the state legislature blocked agricultural labor reforms proposed by liberal Governor Culbert Olson and his Director of Immigration and Housing, Carey McWilliams.
Setbacks such as these did not daunt Tom Collins or, for that matter, John Steinbeck. In early 1938 the two men were on the road again in rural California, travelling in the “old pie wagon” gathering material for a projected “big novel” on the Okie migration. They witnessed the devastating effects of that winter’s floods on the Central Valley’s “Little Oklahomas.” Collins later described how he and Steinbeck worked “for forty-eight hours, and without food or sleep,” helping “sick and half-starved people whose camps had been destroyed by the floods.” “We couldn’t speak to one another because we were too tired,” Collins remembered, “yet we worked together as cogs in an intricate piece of machinery.”
These and other experiences found their way into the letter and spirit of Grapes of Wrath, published in the spring of 1939. The