IOURNAUSM AND UTERATURE
THE RELATIONSHIP BEIWEEN JOHN STEINBECK’S
EARLY REPORTING AND HIS NOVEL
THE GRAPES 0F WRATH

Thesis for the Degree of M. A
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
FRANCES MILLER laBELL
1977

 

 

   
   

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ABSTRACT

JOURNALISM AND LITERATURE:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JOHN STEINBECK'S EARLY REPORTING
AND HIS NOVEL THE GRAPES OF NRATH

By

Frances Miller LaBell

Before John Steinbeck wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
The Grapes of Wrath. he wrote some magazine and newspaper reports on
the problems of migrant workers in California. "Dubious Battle in
California," written for the Nation, a journal dedicated to social
justice. and "California's Harvest Gypsies." a seven-part series
written for the San Francisco News. were impassioned exposes of the
treatment mid-1930's Dust Bowl refugees were enduring under Cali-
fornia's agriculture system. This study explores the relationship
between the reporting and the novel. Its object is to examine the
reportorial style of a great novelist and to determine what his
reportage contributed to the novel.

First the paper explores the artistic setting of The Grapes
of Wrath. The l930's was the decade of the flowering of the docu-
mentary. Writers, photographers and filmmakers flocked to the back
roads of America to record the faces of the rural poor because the
downtrodden farmer was the heroic figure of the 1930's. Steinbeck

was probably familiar with the documentary film and photography of his

 

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Frances Miller LaBell

time because he was a close friend of the filmmaker Pare Lorentz. and
he met Roy Stryker, a chief of a group of top still photographers who
roamed the United States taking pictures. Steinbeck also got informa-
tion about migrant labor in California from officials of the Resettle-
ment Administration, the government organization which employed both
Mr. Lorentz and Mr. Stryker.

John Steinbeck often used elements from real life in his
early novels and stories. Later. he turned to first-hand information
gathering to get material for his novels. In Dubious Battle is a good
example. He got the material by visiting a strike-ridden valley and
meeting strike organizers with his friend Tom Collins. His field work
became more intense just before he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. His
letters of the time. especially, show that he was spending a lot of
his time in the field.

His reporting, done in 1936 while he was gathering informa-
tion for The Grapes of wrath, is compared/in this paper/with the novel
to see what they had in common. Close analysis to juxtapose excerpts
from the reports and the novel is employed. It is found that settings.
facts. phrases and themes from the reports appeared in the novel. It
is found that the reports contributed even more than documentary
authenticity. Steinbeck was an emotional advocate rather than a dis-
passionate reporter. His unorthodox reporting style contains the

germs of the novel's drama, philosophy and impact.

 

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Accepted by the faculty of the School of Journalism, College
of Communication Arts and Sciences. Michigan State University, in

partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree.

 

 

 

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JOURNALISM AND LITERATURE:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JOHN STEINBECK'S EARLY REPORTING
AND HIS NOVEL THE GRAPES OF NRATH

By

Frances Miller LaBell

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
School of Journalism

1977

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

My thanks to Professor George A. Hough 3rd. His suggestions
led me to explore new paths for this paper. His guidance helped me to

shape its form. His encouragement helped me to persevere.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. THE FLOWERING OF THE DOCUMENTARY: ARTISTIC ATMOS-

 

 

PHERE CONTEMPORARY WITH THE GRAPES OF WRATH ...... I
II. FROM FANTASY TO OBSERVATION: HOW STEINBECK TURNED
TO REPORTING ..................... 20
III. JOURNALISM AND LITERATURE: STEINBECK'S REPORTING
AND THE GRAPES OF WRATH ................ 4l
IV. HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON: STEINBECK'S REPORTING
STYLE ......................... 76
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................... 87

iii

CHAPTER I

THE FLOWERING OF THE DOCUMENTARY:
ARTISTIC ATMOSPHERE CONTEMPORARY WITH
THE GRAPES OF WRATH

When the farmer comes to town, with his wagon broken down,
0. the farmer is the man that feeds them all.

If you'll only look and see, I think you will agree,

That the farmer is the man that feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,

The farmer is the man,

Lives on credit till the fall.

And they take him by the hand

And they lead him from the land, 1

And the middleman's the one that gets it all.

The Okies of the l930's sang this song. According to the

recollections of folk singer Woodie Guthrie:

I believe the best I ever heard this song sung was out
there in the cotton strikes in California, around the country
mentioned in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." Four little
girls got up on the stage and sung it together.

John Steinbeck might have heard this song. too, when he traveled.
lived, and worked with the Okies in the California valleys from l936
to 1938. He never claimed that his novel The Grapes of Wrath was a

true story, but its raw material was real life. The novel contains

 

1Alan Lomax, comp.. Hard HittinQZSon s for Hard-Hit People,

notes by Woodie Guthrie, transcribed and ed. by eteTSeeger (New York:
Oak Publications, 1967), pp. 32-33.

21bid., p. 32.

more than echoes of the Okies' songs; it captured their personalities,
accents and way of life.

Steinbeck succeeded in giving such an authentic picture of
Okie life in the l930's that the Okies themselves can verify it. Bud
Campbell, who came to California in 1935 and settled in Weedpatch, a
place that served as a setting in The Grapes of Wrath, said forty
years later that the book was authentic. "He dramatized it a lot and
set up some things and changed the names, but it was all based on
facts. 1'11 tell you that," Mr. Campbell said.3

The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the most famous of the many
books about rural America written in the l930's. It was controversial
and wildly popular when it first came out in April, 1939. Steinbeck
I was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1940. It is a book that has
come to be considered one of the great American novels.

John Steinbeck was only one of the people who turned their
attention to rural America during the Depression. The faces and stories
of sharecroppers. small farmers and migrant workers abounded in news-
papers. magazines and books.- The farmer became a cultural hero in a
struggling society because he represented endurance in times of poverty.
"The popular culture of the era represented the tenant farmer as an

innocent struck down by economic forces beyond his control . . . ."4

 

3Douglas Kneeland. “West Coast 'Okies' Recall Depression,
Scoff at Recession." New York Times. February 22, l975, pp. 29. 32.

4Michael Mehlman, "Hero of the 30's--The Tenant Farmer,"
Heroes of Popular Culture. ed. by Ray B. Browne. Marshall Fishwick and
Michael T. Marsden (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University
Popular Press. 1972). p. 65.

The rural poor excited the imaginations of American writers,
photographers and social scientists. They flocked to the back roads
to interview and take pictures, and they produced novels, photographic
collections and sociological studies. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road
was a popular play, as was John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Narra-
tive and photographs were combined in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by
James Agee and Walker Evans. An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and
Paul S. Taylor, and You Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell and
Margaret Bourke-White. Sociological studies included Herman C. Nixon's
Forty Acres and Steel Mules and Arthur Raper and Ira Reid's Shgrgf
croppers All: and Tenants of the Almighty. Carey McWilliams wrote
Factories in the Field, a study of California's agricultural history.

The Grapes of Wrath and some of the other books were liter-
ary experiments. The authors tried to chronicle a part of life that
moved them deeply. They honed their descriptive skills to the finest
edge, attempting to portray a family eating bisquits and gravy in the
morning chill, or a person trying to pick enough cotton to earn his
supper. They tried to help their readers see these scenes in their
minds and imagine how the characters felt. To do this they tried new
forms.

The novels and other books about the rural poor in the
1930's have only their subject matter in common. They cannot be
classified in one genre. Each work is thoroughly infused with the
personality, beliefs and artistry of its author. The comparison of
the creator to a refracting lens which casts a distorted image of

reality for the viewer of art is an apt comparison.

Serious literature, realistic as well as fabulistic, never
holds an entirely authentic mirror up to nature. That's the
aim of journalism. Literature as opposed to journalism is
always a refracting rather than a reflecting mechanism; it
alwa s to some degree distorts (or as Hemingway said, magni-
fiesg life, if only to give it a shape or clarity that can't

otherwise be detected. And the roots of literary distortion

are always located in the person of the writer himself, in the
individual stamp he puts on his work. It's the deflection and
refraction of the material in the filter of the self that gives

a piece of writing its special edge, that perhaps lifts it to

levels of art. In literature it's really gistortion we prize--
the distortion of the uniquely individual.

Steinbeck produced both journalism and a novel on the migrant
workers of the l930's. He wrote a news series on the migrant workers
for the San Francisco News in October, 1936. His trip to gather informa-
tion for the series did not provide his first glimpse of the migrant
camps; he was already very much aware of the events around him. He
made several additional research trips during the years he worked on
the novel. Steinbeck's reporting is not purely a reflection of real-
ity. He does not simply hold a mirror up to nature. Even in his
reporting his strong interest in and concern for the people he met were
obvious. His feelings grew as he learned more and as he became more
involved in writing the novel. He completed it in a frenzy, working
so hard that he had to rest for several weeks when it was finished.

Like John Steinbeck. James Agee and Erskine Caldwell had
artistic achievement as their central ambition. All three grew up in

areas they were later to write about, and they witnessed the life of

 

5Ronald Weber, "Some Sort of Artistic Excitement," The

Re orter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controvers j—Ed. by
Ronald WeBer (New York: Hastings House, Publishers, 1971), pp. l6-l7.

the rural poor. All three had some reporting experience, and their
work on the rural poor in the l930's grew out of a desire to report.
Their books presented the facts as their authors saw them. The books
were works of literature that presented factual information through
the refracting lens of each author's eyes and skills.

James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was written about
people he observed during four weeks in Alabama in the summer of 1936.
He and Walker Evans, a photographer on leave from the Farm Security
Administration, lived with three tenant families in order to gather
the material for their book.

Agee was a southerner, originally from Tennessee, who was
educated at Exeter and Harvard. He wished to make poetry his life's
work. After graduating from Harvard in l932, he got a job on Fortune.
He was elated at the chance to do an article on southern tenant farmers
for Fortune, especially since the accompanying photographs were to be
taken by Walker Evans, whose work Agee admired. When Fortune turned
down the article, Agee decided to use the material he had collected
for a book.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men wasn't published until 1941,
when the subject of the tenant farmers was already stale. The 47]-
page text depicts the daily life of the Ricketts, Woods and Gudger
families. Agee saw their world as a microcosm of human existance and
he recorded it in painstaking detail, down to the grain of old wood
planks, the pictures on old calendars over the fireplace and the mood

of the breeze sweeping across the front porch.

In recounting the tenant farmers' lives, Agee explores the
nature of reality. He was a reporter who mistrusted the premise of
journalism, that a reporter could convey an idea of reality to another
person. He considered it an impossible goal.

It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly
terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human
beings drawn together through need and chance for profit into
a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the
lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human
beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose
of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of
these lives before another group of human beings, in the name
of science, of "honest journalism" (whatever that paradox may
mean), of humanity, of social fgarlessness, for money and for
a reputation of crusading . . .

Agee's ambivalence is evident in his book, for he did write a long work
about tenant farmers despite his doubts. His descriptions are so unre-
lentingly painstaking that they communicate the author's desperation
to tell the reader everything about the subject. Agee was interested
in photography and he considered Walker Evans one of the finest of
photographers.7 He put more faith in the power of the camera than the
power of words to transmit a flavor of reality.
This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and

weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time;

and is why in turn I feel such a rage at its misuse: which has

spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of

less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even as much as
my own.

 

6James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., l960), p.‘7.

7James A ee, The Collected Short Prose of James A ee, ed. by
Robert Fitzgerald Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 196B), p. 33.

8Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. ll.

If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It
would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth,
bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of
wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.
Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty: critics would
murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of
you to use it as a parlor game.

Another southerner who hoped photographs would show the real
conditions in the south was Erskine Caldwell. He was born in Georgia,
lived in several southern states, and spent some of his teenage years
in Wrens, Georgia,.a small rural town. He remembered seeing impover-
ished sharecropper families when he traveled around the countryside

‘0 As a teenager and a young man,

with his father, who was a minister.
Caldwell tried to earn extra money as a stringer for newspapers. At
age twenty-one he was a cub reporter for the Atlanta Journal.]]
Caldwell's primary ambition was to become a successful novel-
ist. He wrote the novel Tobacco Road, the story of a sharecropper
family in Georgia in 1931. It attained popularity in the form of a
play, written from the novel by Jack Kirkland. It set a record for
the longest-running play in New York, seven and a half years. It was
on the road throughout the United States and around the world for
twelve years.

The play concerned the life of the Lesters, a sharecropper

family. It depicted them as people ground down to the lowest level of

 

91bid., p. 13.

10Erskine Caldwell, Call It Experience: The Yearsgorf Learning
How to Write (New York: DuelT'Sloan and Pearce, i95l), p. 25.

ll

 

I 1d., p. 36.

existence. Wiliness, sloth, viciousness, bestiality, letharQY. and
immorality were some of the components of the characters' personalities.
Some audiences laughed at Jeeter Lester because they considered his
actions comical antics, but Caldwell didn't intend to write a comedy.

He wrote the story in a serious vein to hold a mirror up to his audience.

Whatever effect the story does have, it was not something

consciously sought for or achieved, but is the result of a
desire to tell about a group of persons whose destiny it was

to be born where they were born, to live where they lived, and
to do what they did. All human beings, wherever they live,
are, to some degree, subject to contemporary moral and economic
environment. Tobacco Road, by reason of birth and circumstance
was the home 0? a Few; it, or a similar environment, mightzhave
been, or may be in the future, that of many other people.

Caldwell wrote a newspaper feature series on southern tenant
farmers for the New York Post in February, l935. By that spring he had
the idea for You Have Seen Their Faces.

It was to be a factual study of people in cotton states

living under current economic stress. It was my intention to

show that the fiction I was writing was authentically based

on contemporary life in the South. Furthermore, I felt that

such a book should IS thoroughly documented with photographs

taken on the scene.
Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, a staff photographer for Life,
traveled about 3,000 miles through the Southeast gathering material for
the book.

Photographs and text alternate in the book. First there is

a group of photographs with a quote below each one. An italicized

 

'Zaack Kirkland, Tobaccofioad: A Three Act Play, intro. by
Erskine Caldwell (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1952), n.p.

13Caldwell, Call It Experience, p. 103.

section follows, telling an individual's story as Caldwell heard it.
A section of commentary by Caldwell follows.
You Have Seen Their Faces was meant to give an impression of
what the South was like.
No person, place or episode in this book is fictitious,
but names and places have been changed to avoid unnecessary
individualization; for it is not the authors' intention to
criticize any individuals who are part of the system depicted.
The legends under the pictures are intended to express the
authors' own conceptions of the sentiments of the individuals

portrayed; they do not paetend to reproduce the actual senti-
ments of these persons.

In the book Caldwell explained his own view of southern tenant farming.
He considered it a system that survived by demeaning human beings. The

Lesters of Tobacco Road were the inevitable products of the system as

 

Caldwell saw it, according to statements in You Have Seen Their Faces.

Farm tenancy, and particularly sharecropping, is not self-
perpetuating. It can survive only by feeding upon itself, like
an animal in a trap eating its own flesh and bone. The only
persons interested in its continuation are the landlords who
accumulate wealth by exacting tribute, not from the products
of the earth, but frgm the labor of the men, women and children
who till the earth.

Even the photographs in You Have Seen Their Faces are made to
support the characterizations in Tobacco Road. Ada Lester longed for
a pinch of snuff to relieve the ache of her teeth in Tobacco Road. A
photograph of a worn woman in You Have Seen Their Faces has the caption,

"Snuff is an almighty help when your teeth ache."16

 

14Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen
Their Faces (New York: The Viking Press, l937), n.p.

15Ibid.. p. 75.

16Ibid., p. 150.

 

 

 

_-#_

lO

In spirit, these books about American rural life in the
l930's have a kinship with the documentary film, which was coming into
flower during the l930's. John Steinbeck was certainly familiar with
some of the contemporary documentary films. He was good friends with
Pare Lorentz, who produced documentary films about American life in
the l930's and 1940's, and he was acquainted with Lorentz's work.
Steinbeck himself wrote the script for a documentary film in 1953.
Called The Forgotten Village, it illustrated the health care needs of
people in a rural Mexican village.

The term documentary was first used in a review of Moana, a
film made by Robert Flaherty, a film pioneer who also made Nanook of
the North. In his 1926 review, Robert Grierson used the term docu-
mentary to refer to the fact that the film was a visual record,

. being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Poly-
nesian youth and his family."17
A documentary film has come to mean more than just a factual
record since Grierson used the term. According to Lewis Jacobs, the
documentary genre has gone through three phases. There was the natu-
ralism of the early films, which paralleled the style called natural-
ism in literature. The second phase recorded reality, but didn't try

to express a story or use narrative. Its filmmakers were interested

in "art for art's sake." Toward the end of the 1920's the documentary

 

17John Grierson, "Flaherty's Poetic Moana," The Documentary
Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock, sel. by [awis JacObs (New York:
Hopkinson and Blake, Publishers, 197l), p. 25.

ll

became a vehicle for dramatizing life and advancing ideas for social
betterment.18

John Grierson was a pioneer in making the third type of film
with his Drifters, in I928. He led the Empire Marketing Board Film
Unit, which was sponsored by the British government in 1928. He con-
sidered his films a means of educating Britons about their country and
advancing patriotism. He believed they created interest in peacetime
life, thus furthering world peace.19

In the 1930's the documentary, or film with a message,
flourished through the craftsmanship of filmmakers all over the world.

Grierson was the father of British documentary. In Germany, Leni

Riefenstahl made documentaries like The Triumph of the Will to glorify

 

the Third Reich. Joris Ivens. a Dutch filmmaker, turned from the
poetic films he made in the l920's to films with a socio-political
message. The first of these, Borinage, expressed outrage at living
conditions in the coal mining region of Southwest Belgium.

In the United States during the l930's the government nur-
tured two groups of documentary artists, one which made films under
Pare Lorentz, and one which produced still photographs, under Roy
Stryker. The groups operated under the Information Division of the
Resettlement Administration, which was established in April, 1935.

Under Rexford Tugwell, an economist from Columbia University, the

 

18Ibid., Lewis Jacobs, ”The Feel of a New Genre," pp. l2-l3.

 

19

Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History
(New York: E. P.

Dutton & Co. Inc., 1973), pp. 7L8.

l2

Resettlement Administration subsidized farm families who were on the
brink of failure with small loans. Another Resettlement Administration
program bought up or leased parcels of workable farm land and moved
families from ruined land to supervised collective farms on the land
parcels. The Resettlement Administration also created suburban com-
munities, the greenbelt towns near Washington, D.C., Cincinnati and
Milwaukee. Under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, the
Farm Security Administration took over from the Resettlement Adminis-
tration and retained many of its personnel.

The agency's Film Division under Pare Lorentz produced several
documentary films about American life. Lorentz was not a filmmaker,
but a successful film critic for newspapers and magazines, when he
came to the government with his ideas about filming American life.

His first two films, made in the l930's, The Plow that Broke the
Elgjp§_and The River, won both popular and critical acclaim. The Plow
that Broke the Plains showed the destruction and erosion of land that
resulted from wasteful and poorly planned farming methods. The film,
with a musical score by Vergil Thompson, had its first showing in
early March, 1936, before President Roosevelt and senators and repre-
sentatives from the Dust Bowl states. Lorentz's second film, Ihg_
‘Rivgg, depicted life along the Mississippi and its tributaries. While
the filming was going on, a devastating flood occurred and its conse-
quences were shown in the footage of The River.

Steinbeck and Lorentz were friends during the l930's, and

Lorentz says their relationship was a friendship rather than a

l3

professional relationship. He doesn't feel that they influenced each
other in their work.

. . . we were working men together. We enjoyed each other's

company. At no time did I suggest to him that he do anything

and at no time did he suggest to me that I do anything, but

for a period of a few years before the Second World War we

had hoped to work to ether. We never discussed anything called

"documentary"; we talked about our country and words and

worthy people. And women and politics and anecdgtes--me from

the hill country, and he from the Pacific Ocean. 0
During the spring of I940 Steinbeck and Lorentz did work together
briefly. Just after The Grapes of Wrath was published Steinbeck wanted
to escape his new notoriety, so he joined Lorentz in Chicago, where he
was making a film about health care. "John Steinbeck briefly and
hilariously was on my payroll as assistant cameraman at Government

“21 Lorentz

wages working on my Government movie The Fight for Life,
recalled. Although Pare Lorentz denies that he and Steinbeck influ-
enced each other in their work, they were certainly familiar with one
another's work during the late l930's.

Another group of documentary artists working under the
Resettlement Administration and later the Farm Security Administration
was the Historical Section under Roy Stryker. This group's mission
was to create an historical record of contemporary life by means of
still photography. Roy Stryker came from Colorado to study economics

under Rexford Tugwell, who later became Resettlement Administration

and Farm Security Administration chief. Although he didn't complete

 

20Letter, Pare Lorentz to Frances Miller, August 5, 1974.

”mid.

14

his Ph.D. at Columbia, Stryker gained a wide practical knowledge of
American economics. As an instructor, he led a class through a series
of field trips. He used his strong interest in pictures when he and
Tugwell produced an economics textbook liberally illustrated with
photographs.

As head of the Historical Section, Stryker served as mentor
to noted photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell
Lee, Carl Mydans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon. The
photographers roamed the country for months at a time, at first cover-
ing primarily rural life and later towns and cities as well. They
produced more than l80,000 photographs, which Stryker arranged to
give to the Library of Congress.

Both Roy Stryker and some regional field workers of the
Resettlement Administration helped Steinbeck by providing information
for The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck met with Stryker some time in l938
and spent several days going through the Historical Section's picture

22

files with him. People in the Administration's San Francisco office

also helped provide Steinbeck with information. Two of them were Eric
Thompson and George Hedley, ministers on leave from their congrega-
tions, and the third was Thomas Collins, a man who was Steinbeck's

23

friend and his first guide through California's valleys. The Grapes

 

22F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Ro Str ker and
the Development of Documentary Photpgrpphy Tn the Tfiiptjes (Baton
Rouge: LouiSTana State University Press, I972), p. l40.

 

23Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The
Sha ing of a Novelist (Minneapolis: TTheUniversity of Minnesota Press,
I973), p. 129.

15

of Wrath is dedicated to Tom Collins and Steinbeck's first wife, Carol.
From the San Francisco office Steinbeck embarked on one of his field
trips to observe migrant workers. Accompanying him was a Resettlement
Administration official, and both men were dressed like migrant
workers.24

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during a period

 

when artists were using many media: writing, film and still photo-
graphy, to describe the world around them. Steinbeck, like many of
these contemporary artists, focused on the rural poor. They combined
reporting and art in unique ways to produce new forms that educated
and stirred people. Steinbeck not only worked at the same time as
some great documentarists, he had contact with them and was familiar
with their work.

Steinbeck may have been experimenting with a new form of
literature when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, but he was also joining
an American literary tradition. Writers of the past relied on report-
age for the raw material of their stories, for the cloth on which
their artistry could embroider, and writers continue in this tradition.

Mark Twain, for example, was a newspaper reporter before he

wrote novels, and his earliest books, like Innocents Abroad and Rough-

 

ing It were comical accounts of his travel experiences. His youth and
later experience as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River permeate

some of his greatest books, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Herman

 

 

Melville voyaged on a whaling ship and spent two years traveling in

 

24Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, p. 140.

 

Ill-ll. all: 'lll II III

16

the South Sea Islands before he wrote Moby Dick and Typee. Stephen
Crane was a reporter during the Spanish-American War, and some of his
short stories are based on his war experiences. He knew the slum life

depicted in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets because he spent several

 

years living in poverty in New York City's slums.

Writers of the l960's and l970's continue to combine lite-
rary skill and reportage in a movement some people call the New
Journalism. Tom Wolfe, the style's chief spokesman, said he first
heard the term New Journalism used in late 1966. He realized “. . .
suddenly there was an artistic excitement going on in journalism."25
The hallmark of the style was the use of techniques usually associated

“26

with novels and short stories . . . in accurate nonfiction. While

Tom Wolfe recognizes the blossoming of creativity in reporting, he
also criticizes present-day literary critics for underestimating the
factual content of artistic works.
It is one of the unconscious assumptions of modern criticism
that the raw material is simply ”there." It is the "given."
The idea is: Given such-and-such a body of material, what
has the artist done with it? The crucial part that reporting
plays in all story-telling, whether in novels, films, or non-
fiction, is something that is not so much ignored as simply
not comprehended.27
Seymour Krim, a veteran newspaperman, believes that the mass

media, newspapers and magazines, have taken the place that novels used

 

25Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism with an anthology ed. by
Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,
I973), p. 22.

Ibid., p. l5.

III-II

bid., p. 14.

17

to have in "probing the reality" of an American generation. He, too,
acknowledges the vital role of reporting in the works of the finest
American writers, but now, he says, applying fictional techniques to
the current scene is more crucial.28

Another writer designates the term documentary narrative to
refer to prose works which are a blend of reporting and artistry.
"Documentary narrative, as I understand the term, is that kind of
prose work in which the author creates the impression that he has
investigated the circumstances of an actual event and that he can

prove the validity of his account of the event," says Donald Pizer,

professor of English at Tulane University.29

By "documentary" I mean that the writer tries to create
an effect of circumstantiality, either by including verifi-
able documents and quotation or by appearing to do so. His
emphasis on seemingly verifiable detail--the names of people
and places, the full listing of the objects in a room or the
contents of a suitcase, and much direct quotation--achieves
the effect of documentation whether or not he includes or
appends his sources. By "narrative" I mean that the writer
pays exceptional attention to chronology. All narrative, of
course, relies to some degree on the passage of time as a
structural device. But in documentary narrative the writer
is recurrently and explicitly exact about events in relation
to time. His narrative technique thus contributes to the
effect of documentary authenticity. By placing in immediate
juxtaposition two of the seemingly most verifiable aspects
of experience--objects and the movement of the clock--the
writer seeks to persuade us that his account is accurate and
authentic, since its principal components can be checked.
Some documentary narratives include time-~charts, a device
which has the effect of making even more "solid"--that is,
observable--the relationship between objects and time, a

 

28Seymour Krim, "The Newspaper as Literature," The Reporter
as Artist, p. I73.

29Donald Pizer, "Documentary Narrative as Art: William Man-
chester and Truman Capote," The Reporter as Artist, p. 207.

l8

relationship which in essence is the event itself. By "art"

I mean that the author imposes theme upon the event portrayed
by means of his selection, arrangement and emphasis of the
details of his documentation and his narrative. His theme
may be merely an interpretation of a large phase of experience
which the event illustrates. But as in most literary works,
verisimilitude is ultimately a means towards an end rather
than an end in itself, although the author 86 the documentary
narrative may seek to suggest the contrary.

Professor Pizer's definition of "documentary narrative"
acknowledges both the elements of reportage and art which are combined
in a work such as The Grapes of Wrath. Reporting, the observation of
actual events and places, is used for the author's purposes. The means
of producing the work is the author's art, the way in which he filters
information taken from real life through the lens of his individuality
to produce a work of art.

The Grapes of Wrath is the narrative of the Joad family's
journey from Oklahoma to California and their attempts to make a living.
Time is measured by their day-to-day progress along the highways and
from camp to camp in California. The Joads are an exemplary family
rather than a real family, but both the details of their lives and the
background of American history across which they move can be verified.

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during the l930's,
a period when there was a surge of documentary work being done, both
in print and on film. Steinbeck was aware of some of this activity
and had contact with some of the greatest documentary artists working

with film in the United States. His primary ambition was to become a

novelist, not a reporter, and yet, it turned out that his talent as a

 

3OIbid.. pp. 208-209.

19

reporter contributed heavily to The Grapes of Wrath, one of his best

 

novels. In the novels that preceded The Grapes of Wrath, elements

 

observed from life became more and more prominent with each succeeding
one, until the blend of reporting and art reached its full flower in

Steinbeck's novel about rural American people.

CHAPTER II

FROM FANTASY TO OBSERVATION:
HOW STEINBECK TURNED TO REPORTING

I'm going down that road feeling bad,

I'm going down that road feeling bad,

I'm going down that road feeling bad Lord, Lord

I ain't gonna be treated this-a-way.1

Woodie Guthrie sang this song and it is heard on the

movie soundtrack of "Grapes." He was asked: "Sing a song,
just don't even think, and without thinking just haul off
and sing the very first song that hits your mind--one that

if a crowd of lgO pure blood Okies was to hear it, 90 of 'em
would know it.“

Fine touches like this song lend authenticity to a book or a
movie, and John Steinbeck gleaned such details for The Grapes of Wrath
from personal observation. Early in his career, when he tried working
as a newspaperman in New York City, he probably didn't realize how
important reporting was to become when he wrote his finest novels. In
November, I925, when he was twenty-three years old, the Californian
arrived in New York hoping to begin a successful career as a writer of
serious literature. He got a job trundling wheelbarrows of cement to

complete the building of Madison Square Garden.

 

1Alan Lomax, comp., Hard Hittipg Songs for Hard-Hit People,

notes by Woodie Guthrie, transcribed and ed.ByPete Seeger (New York:
Oak Publications, 1967), pp. 2l5-2l6.

2mm. p. 215.

20

21

His uncle later got him a job reporting for the New York
American, a Hearst paper.

My uncle got me a job on a newspaper--the New York
American down on William Street. I didn't know the first
thing about being a reporter. I think that the $25 a week
that they paid me was a total loss. They gave me stories
to cover in Queens and Brooklyn and I would get lost and
spend hours trying to find my way back. I couldn't learn
to steal a picture from a desk when a family refused to be
photographed and I invariably got emotionally involved and
tried to kill the whole story to save the subject.

Steinbeck probably didn't realize it in l925, but his ability
to sympathize with his subjects was the quality that was to lead him
to write books like The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. It was
his emotional involvement with the subjects of these books that led him
to study them so carefully. Steinbeck was transferred to the Federal
Courts after his first week as a reporter, although he wondered why he
hadn't been fired.
I wonder if I could ever be as kind to a young punk as
those men in the reporters' room at the Park Row Post Office
were to me. They pretended that I knew what I was doing and
they did their best to teach me in a roundabout way. I
learned to play bridge and where to look for suits and
sandals (sic). They informed me which judges were pushovers
for publicity and several times they covered for me when I
didn't show up. You can't repay that kind of thing. I never
got to know them. Didn't know where they lived4 what they
did, or how they lived when they left the room.
Another, later account of his work for the American has a
much less modest tone. It also reveals his dislike for the journalistic

style of William Randolph Hearst.

 

BJODO Steinbeck, "Autobiography: The Making of a New Yorker,"
New York Times, February l, I953, sec. 6, Part II, p. 26.

4113111.. p. 27.

22

I worked for the American and was assigned to Federal
Court in the old Park Row post office where I perfected my
bridge game and did some lousy reporting. I did however
perfect a certain literary versatility. This was during
Prohibition, and Federal judges as well as others in power
were generous with confiscated whiskey to the press room.
Therefore it became my duty sometimes, as cadet reporter,
to send the same story to Graphic, American, Times, Tribune
and Brooklyn Eagle each in its own vernacular when some of
my peers were unable to catch the typewriter as it went by.
Then I was fired. I learned that external reality had no
jurisdiction in the Hearst press and that what happgned must
in no case interfere with what WR wanted to happen.

After he lost his job he tried to find another, but he was unsuccess-
ful.
I looked for jobs--but good jobs, pleasant jobs. I couldn't
get them. I wrote short stories and tried to sell them. I
applied for work on other papers, which was ridiculous on the
face of it.6
The short stories Steinbeck was trying to sell were a collection he
wrote after Guy Holt, an editor for McBride and Company, encouraged
him. Holt left McBride and another editor rejected Steinbeck's sto-
ries.7 After a discouraging year in New York he returned to California
the way he had come, on a freight ship by way of the Panama Canal.
Before his New York sojourn, Steinbeck had studied on and

off at Stanford University and worked mostly at outdoor jobs in his

native California. He grew up in Salinas, a center for growing

 

- 5Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A
Life in Letters (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), p._§1

6John Steinbeck, "Autobiography," p. 27.

7Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A
First Critical Stugy (Chicago: Normandie House, I939), p. 78.

23

lettuce, an area in one of California's agricultural valleys, which
was much like the areas he was later to write about.

Even during high school he began taking outdoor jobs. He
spent many of his high school vacations working as a hired hand on
ranches. Between high school and college he spent a year working as
an assistant chemist in a sugar beet factory. During the five years
he spent taking courses at Stanford he took time off to work on various
ranches, including one near King City in the southern part of the
Salinas Valley. He helped build the first road below Big Sur and he
worked for a while in an Oakland haberdashery store. For a while he
returned to the sugar beet factory as night chemist.

When he returned to the West Coast from New York he also
returned to the kind of jobs he had held during high school and col-
lege. He wrote his first novel, Cup of Gold during the two winters he
spent as the caretaker of an estate at Lake Tahoe in the Sierra
Mountains and during a job at a fish hatchery.§f Cup of Gold is a work
of historical fiction about Henry Morgan, the buccaneer of the Carib-
bean who captured the golden city of Panama and became governor of
Jamaica after a royal pardon. The book was published in August, l929,
by McBride and Co. Steinbeck was disappointed by the low sales.

Cup of Gold is the only one of Steinbeck's works prior to
The Grapes of Wrath that was not set in California. With each succes-
sive literary effort he relied more on the California he knew. His

early characters were the Mexican paisanos he had observed in coastal

 

81bid., p. 12.

24

towns, the bindle stiffs of the ranches and the citizens of the small
farms. He knew the settings from his own experiences. Some of the
characters and plots he based upon stories his friends and neighbors
told him.

With his novels In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath

 

he progressed further toward realism. He went from basing his work
upon people and scenes which happened to be familiar to him to actively
seeking information for his books. In these two novels Steinbeck
studied his raw material like a reporter and portrayed the details and
events of life in California's agricultural areas like a reporter.
Steinbeck, however, used this information to write novels, which meant
he imposed his own sense of order and philosophy upon it to develop a
cohesive form.

Steinbeck's second book, The Pastures of Heaven, might have
been based on some stories told to him by Miss Beth Ingels, who lived
in a California valley called Corral de Tierra, for many years.9 One
family's story links all the others, the tale of a family called the
Munroes in the book. They were a well intentioned, industrious group,
but they seemed to be under a curse that brought misfortune to every
person who had a relationship with them. In a l93l letter to one of
his literary agents, Mavis McIntosh of McIntosh & Otis, Steinbeck dis-

cussed the raw material for The Pastures of Heaven:

 

 

9Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The
Shaping of a Novelist (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press,
1973), p. 96.

25

The present work interests me and perhaps falls in the
"aspects" theme you mention. There is, about twelve miles
from Monterey, a valley in the hills called Corral de Tierra.
Because I am using its people I have named it Las Pasturas
del Cielo. The valley was for years known as the happy valley
because of the unique harmony which existed among its twenty
families. About ten years ago a new family moved in on one of
the ranches. They were ordinary people, ill-educated but
honest and kindly as any. In fact, in their whole history I
cannot find that they have committed a really malicious act
nor an act which was not dictated by honorable expediency or
out-and-out altruism. But about the Morans there was a flavor
of evil. Everyone they came in contact with was injured.
Every place they went dissension sprang up. There have been
two murders, a suicide, many quarrels and a great deal of
unhappiness in the Pastures of Heaven, and all of these things
can be traced airectly to the influence of the Morans. So
much is true.1

The Pastures of Heaven was published in l932, and To a God Unknown fol-

 

lowed in l933. To a God Unknown was inspired by a play begun by Webster
Street, a lawyer, who was a friend of Steinbeck's. Street turned it

1] Stein-

over to Steinbeck because he was having trouble completing it.
beck built on Street's plot and set the story in the Big Sur country,
where he had worked on a road building crew.

Until the publication of his next book, Tortilla Flat, Stein-
beck wasn't making much money from his writing. During the depression
years of the l930's he was living in Pacific Grove, California, in a
three-room cottage that belonged to his father. His father also gave
Steinbeck and his wife, Carol, $25 a month. Their food consisted of

home-grown vegetables and fish they caught in the ocean. Carol brought

in some additional money from various jobs, including one as an

 

10Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, pp.

42-43.

1'1 1a.. pp. 81-82.

26

assistant to Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist who ran Pacific Biological
Laboratories on Cannery Row in Monterey. Ricketts and Steinbeck had
been close friends since they met in I930.

Tortilla Flat was another collection of short episodes uni-

 

fied by a quest theme inspired by Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, one of
Steinbeck's favorite books. The characters are based on ". . . the
Mexicans and Yaquis taken from the jails of northern Mexico . . ." whom
Steinbeck supervised on his summer job working the night shift at a
sugar beet factory.12 Some of the stories were told to him by Susan
Gregory, a resident of Monterey, to whom the book is dedicated. The
purpose of the round-table theme was to unify the book, not to make a
moral point, Steinbeck says in a I934 letter to Mavis McIntosh:

But the little dialogue, if it came between the incidents

would at least make clear the form of the book, its tragi-

comic theme. It would also make clear and sharp the strong

but different philosophic-moral system of these people. I

don't intend to make the parallel of the round table more

clear, but simply to show that a cycle is there. You will

remember that the association forms, flowers and dies. Far

from having a hard theme running through the book, one of

the intents is to show that rarely does agy theme in the

lives of these people survive the night.

The group of four short stories that made up The Red Popy con-

 

tained other scenes familiar to Steinbeck. In these stories he tried
to capture the spirit of boyhood in the life of Jody, a boy growing up
on a Salinas Valley ranch. Just like Steinbeck as a boy, Jody saw the

Santa Lucia mountains to his west and the Gabilan mountains to the east.

 

12Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Bruns-
wick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958), p. 73}

13Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 97.

27

Of Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath
are Steinbeck's three l930's works on California agriculture. Of Mice
and Men was published between the other two books, but it belongs to
that part of Steinbeck's work based on his background rather than his

observation of the current scene. The main characters of Of Mice and

 

Mep_were bindle stiffs, the wandering workers of the California ranches.
George and Lenny were modeled on the solitary men who carried their
belongings with them and tramped from one ranch to another in search
of work. They were the original migrant workers of California and
they preceded the stream of foreign-born workers imported to work on
the farms as well as the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930's. Of Mice
and Men may have been inspired by scenes near King City, where Stein-
beck once worked on a ranch.
The novel was an experiment, an attempt to write a novel

that could be performed as a play. Steinbeck wrote:

Simply stated, Of Mice and Men was an attempt to write a

novel that could be played from the lines or a play that

could be read. The reading of plays is a specialized kind

of reading, and the technique TE reading plays must be

acqu1red w1th some d1ff1culty.
A play in novel form, Steinbeck believed, would have advantages over
both forms. The novel would be less symbolic and abstract than the
play and thus easier to absorb, and it would be easier to read. The

descriptive material in the novel would aid the reader and the poten-

tial play director in visualizing the scenes. The novel form would

 

14John Steinbeck, ". . . the novel might benefit by the dis-
cipline, the terseness. . . ." Stage, 15, January, 1936, p. 50.

28

transcend the time, place and scene limitations of the play. The play
had an advantage over the novel form because the spirit of live per-

formance drew the individuals in the audience together in an emotional
reaction.15

The experiment was attempted, but it was not entirely suc-
cessful. The novel was read on the stage by a San Francisco labor-
theater group in 1937, but it did not go smoothly.

The timing was out, the curtains were badly chosen, some of
the scenes got off the line, and many of the methods ordi-
narily used in the novel aqg which I used in the book, do
not get over on the stage.
A later version of Of Mice and Men, written especially for the stage
was to become a tremendous success.

In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath used as their sub-
ject matter segments of current history. For these two novels, Stein-
beck made field trips to study the people he wrote about and to gather
information about their situation in life. Before writing these novels
he either considered producing them as journalism, or he actually wrote
news articles on the topics he was researching.

A friend of Steinbeck's, Thomas Collins, introduced him to
the California agriculture scene which was to become the setting of
In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. Collins assisted Steinbeck

with the fieldwork for both novels. The Grapes of Wrath is dedicated

to Collins and to Steinbeck's first wife, Carol. The dedication reads,

 

151bid.. pp. 50-51.

1615111., p. 51.

29

"To Carol who willed this book. To Tom who lived it."17 A character

in The Grapes of Wrath may be based on Collins: the kindly manager at

 

the Weedpatch migrant camp who won Ma Joad's confidence by treating
her with respect. Collins did serve at the Resettlement Administra-
tion's camp for migrant workers at Arvin, California at the time
Steinbeck was doing research for his novel.

Steinbeck was already considering "the Communist idea,"18

which was to become In Dubious Battle, as early as 1934, when he was

 

still finishing Tortilla Flat. The novel is about a strike of migrant
workers in a California valley. Collins, who was working as a social
worker, called Steinbeck into the fields to observe actual strikes.
Collins introduCed him to Communist party labor organizers who became
models for the strike organizers in the novel. At first Steinbeck
wrote to his friend, George Albee, he considered writing about the
strike in a journalistic piece.
You remember I had an idea that I was going to write

the autobiography of a Communist. Then Miss McIntosh sug-

gested that I reduce it to fiction. There lay the trouble.

I had planned to write a journalistic account of a strike.

But as I thought of it as fiction the thing got bigger and

bigger. It couldn't be that. I've been living with this

thing for some time now. I don't know how much I have got

over, but I have used a small strike in an orchard valley 19

as the symbol of man's eternal, bitter warfare with himself.
Steinbeck prided himself on the realism of the novel, especially on

the fidelity of his portrayal of its people. The characters spoke in

 

17John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: The Viking
Press, 1939), n.p.

18Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 97.

191510., p. 98.

3O

"vulgar" language but Steinbeck defended it. "I have worked along

with working stiffs and I have rarely heard a sentence that had not

20

some bit of profanity in it." When a staff member of Steinbeck's

publisher, Covici-Friede, read In Dubious Battle and protested that

 

the Communists in the book didn't follow the Communist Party ideology,
Steinbeck became extremely angry.
Answering the complaint that the ideology is incorrect, this
is the silliest of criticism. There are as many communist
systems as there are communists. It should be obvious from
the book that not only is this true, but that the ideologies
change to fit a situation. In this book I was making nothing
up. In any statement used by one of the protagonists I have
simply used statements I have heard used.
Steinbeck maintained that his book was based on people he observed in
the field, not on the intellectualizings of theorists.
My information for this book came mostly from Irish and Italian
communists whose training was in the field, not in the drawing
room. They don't believe in ideologies and idsgl tactics.
They do what they can under the circumstances.

In Dubious Battle told the story of a migrant farm workers'
strike in the Torgas Valley, a fictional California valley, modeled
after places Steinbeck had actually seen, such as the Pajaro Valley,
north of his hometown, Salinas. Two party workers, Mac, a veteran of
many strikes, and Jim, a novice, arrive in the valley of apple orchards
and help instigate a strike. They convince a small farmer to allow the

strikers to camp on his land. They call in Doc Burton to oversee the

 

2015121., p. 99.

bid., p. 107.
221bid.. p. 110.

w

0—.

31

sanitary conditions, thus assuring that the strikers won't be evicted
by the health authorities. The book's brutal battle doesn't produce
a clear victory for either side; the large growers don't get their
crops picked for the low wages they offer and the workers don't win
higher wages or better living conditions. Individuals are killed in
clashes with vigilantes backed by the growers and the martyrs become
symbols which spur on the raging strife.

The scenario of strikes such as this one in In Dubious Battle
is verified by Carey McWilliams, the foremost historian of California
agriculture of the 1930's. A small group of Communist Party workers
was helping to foment the strikes by moving in where unrest was rumored
and helping to accelerate the movement from discontent to action.23
Strikes were numerous and some were violent. Carey McWilliams counted
approximately 180 agricultural strikes between January 1, 1933 and
June 1, 1939, the years of the heaviest Dust Bowl migration to Cali-
fornia. McWilliams summarized the situation:

Strikes had taken place in 34 out of 58 counties in Cali-
fornia: in every important agricultural community and in
every major crop. The national significance of these strikes
can, perhaps, best be appraised in light of the realization
that California produces about 40 percent of the fruits and
vegetables consumed in the United States. Normally employing
only 4.4 percent of the nation's agricultural workers, Cali-
fornia has been the scene of from 34.3 percent to 100 percent
of the annual strikes in agriculture. The importance of the
strikes themselves can be variously illustrated. Approxi-
mately 89,276 workers were involved in 113 out of a total of

I80 strikes recorded during this period. Civil and criminal
disturbances occurred in 65 out of I80 strikes; arrests were

 

23Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1939), p. 214.

32

reported in 39 strikes; property damage in II strikes and
evictions and deportations in 15 strikes. The year 1937,
which marked the height of the dust bowl migration, was also
the year in which 14 "violent" strikes occurred.24

A strike which occurred in the San Joaquin Valley in October, 1933, has

some facts in common with the strike depicted in In Dubious Battle.

 

More than 18,000 cotton workers were involved. Some of the strikers
rented land near Corcoran, California, and erected a tent camp. The
strike went on for twenty-four days amidst pressure from the press,
vigilante action, and harassment from government authorities. Two
union workers were killed when ranchers opened fire on a union meeting
and one union worker was murdered. Three thousand workers staged an
orderly march through Bakersfield as part of the funeral.25
There was even a strike in Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas
in September, 1936. About 3,500 workers left the lettuce fields and
packing sheds, halting the production of 90 percent of the nation's
lettuce crop, which was grown on more than 70,000 acres in Monterey
County.( Colonel Henry Sanborn, an army reserve officer and publisher
of the red-baiting journal, The American Citizen, took over direction
of the town from the sheriff and made Salinas an armed camp. Local
citizens were recruited and armed in case they had to put down strike
riots, and the press screamed against the strike. Strike breakers

were brought in and the jails were filled with arrested strikers. A

stock of tear gas was purchased and 200 rounds were used against the

 

24Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Barnes &
Nobel, Inc., 1967), p. 15.

25Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field, pp. 219-224.

 

 

strikers
0f the 5

around 1

comic fa
him as a
quarters
zens as
”Everyon
town was

Pe0ple o
wrote Of

Several

f0] IOWI n.
SEVEral 1
Water]: al
Eral mOn‘

beCk:

\

M’ LII-”1e

33

strikers. The growers managed to send out the lettuce crop in spite
of the strike, but at a huge cost. There were barbed wire barricades
around the packing sheds and guards with machine guns on the roofs.26
Steinbeck remembered the strike years later as if it were a
comic farce. He called Colonel Sanborn l'The General" and described
him as a buffoon, who installed numerous telephone lines at his head-
quarters in a local hotel. He described the recruitment of local citi-
zens as one of the most exciting events to happen in town in years.
"Everyone was having a good time. Stores were closed and to move about
town was to be challenged every block or so by viciously weaponed
people one had gone to school with."27
After In Dubious Battle was published in 1935, Steinbeck
wrote Of Mice and Men. He also took a much-longed-for trip to Mexico.
In 1936 Steinbeck resumed his field research. He made
several trips to different areas of the state where migrants were
following the harvests. Some of his excursions were the basis of

several news articles. On these trips he was also gathering raw

material for The Grapes of Wrath. During 1936-1938, except for sev-

 

eral months in 1937, he was continually traveling in California's
agricultural valleys and working on The Grapes of Wrath.
In the summer of 1936 a friend received a note from Stein-

beck:

 

261bid.. pp. 254-259.

27John Steinbeck, "Always Something to do in Salinas," Holi-
da , June, 1955, pp. 156, 158.

34

I have to write this sitting in a ditch. I'll be home in

two or three weeks. I'm not working-~may go south to pick

a little cotton. All this, needless to say, is not for

publication--migrants are goggg south now and I'TT—probably

go along. I enjoy 1t a lot.
He wrote the note from the Gridley Migrant Camp, north of Sacramento,
California. His first article about the migrant situation was written
for the Natjgp, a journal of opinion dedicated to the cause of social
justice. It appeared September 12, 1936, and was called "Dubious Bat-
tle in California." The article describes the workers' plight in
California agriculture. Migrants had come from a stream of foreign-
born workers, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Mexicans, some imported
mainly for field work. The latest stream of migrant workers were
American born, Dust Bowl refugees. In this article Steinbeck focused
on the individuals, such as those who were minor characters in his
novel In Dubious Battle. His attention was on the people who were
caught up in such strikes.

About the time Steinbeck's article appeared in the Natjpp,
he was asked to make another field trip to see how the migrants were
faring. A group of about 3,000 people was caught in heavy rains in
King's County, California, and was marooned on high ground amidst
soaked and flooded fields.

I had a friend, George West of the San Francisco News,

who asked me to go over there and write a news story--the
first private enterprise job I could remember. What I found

horrified me. We had been simply poor, but these people were
literally starving and by that I mean they were dying of it.

 

28Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p.
129.

 

 

II
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a1
1!
we
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Steinbc
News ca
October
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It Was
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35

Marooned in the mud, they were wet and hungry and miserable.
In addition they were fine, brave people. They took me over
completely, heart and soul. I wrote six or seven articles
and then did what I could to try to get food to them. The
local people were scared. They did what they could, but it
was natural that fear and perhaps Bity made them dislike the
dirty, helpless horde of locusts.2

Steinbeck's trip produced a seven-part series for the San Francisco
News called "California's Harvest Gypsies," which ran from Sunday,
October 5 to Monday, October 12, I936.

Steinbeck continued his visits with migrants, he explained
to a friend, and things were so tense in California in the Fall of
1936 that the News delayed printing the series for about a month after
it was completed.

Now I'm working hard on another book which isn't mine

at all. I'm only editing it but it is a fine thing. A com-
plete social study made of the weekly reports from a migrant
camp.

Then I did an article for the Nation and a series of

articles for the News on migrant labor but the labor situa-
tion is so tense right now that the News is scared and won't
print the series. Any reference to labor excess as dirty
dogs is not printed by the big press out here.

In April, 1937 Steinbeck and his wife traveled to New York
and embarked from there on a trip to Europe which lasted several months.
They were able to travel because sales of Of Mice and Men were bringing
prosperity. Steinbeck had already started working on the book which
was to become The Grapes of Wrath late in 1936. Elizabeth Otis, who

was Steinbeck's literary agent and friend for many years, said she

 

29

John Steinbeck, "A Primer on the Thirties," sguire, June,
1960, p. 90.

30Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p.
132.

36

knew of no particular reason for the Steinbecks to travel to Europe
when they did. He never gave any explanation for the trip, but per-
haps he simply wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to travel.31
Of Mice and Men was headed for success as a play in 1937.
George S. Kaufman was working on the dramatization. Steinbeck stopped
at Kaufman's farm when he returned from Europe in August, 1937, in
order to put the final touches on the play. It opened November 23,
1937 in New York, and it won the Drama Critic's Circle Award for that
year. Steinbeck didn't attend the opening or go to New York to accept
the award because he was back in California, working on The Grapes of
Wrath, When they returned from Europe, the Steinbecks bought a car
and traveled west with migrant caravans, getting to know the people.32
After his return to California, Steinbeck made several field
trips to observe and gather information about migrant workers. His
main interest at the time, according to his letters, was to arouse
people and the government to provide aid for the migrants. He hoped
to write articles for magazines and newspapers to arouse public inte-
rest.
I don't know whether I'll go south or not but I must go
to Visalia. Four thousand families, drowned out of their
tents are really starving to death. The resettlement admin-
istration of the government asked me to write some news
stories. The newspapers won't touch the stuff but they will

under my byline. The locals are fighting the government
bringing in food and medicine. I'm going to break the story

 

3IInterview with Elizabeth Otis, McIntosh & Otis Literary
Agent, New York, N. Y., July 3, I974.

32Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p.

141.

 

bar
and
loc
This let
Steinbec
he had h
Jus
agg
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won
wit
tur
cha
anc

The
mag

of
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Althougr
I“ecor‘ds
“Shed a
plCtUreg
movie V£
Februarl
idea was

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\

37

hard enough so that food and drugs can get moving. Shame

and a hatred of publicity will do the job to the miserable
local bankers. 3

This letter, written to Miss Otis on February 14, I938, demonstrates
Steinbeck's zeal. According to a March 7, 1938 letter to Miss Otis,
he had his literary agency working to place such an article.

Just got back from another week in the field. The floods have
aggravated the starvation and sickness. I went down for Life
this time. Fortune wanted me to do an article for them but I
won't. I don't like the audience. Then Life sent me down
with a photographer from its staff and we took a lot of pic-
tures of the people. They guarantee not to use it if they
change it and will send me the proofs. They paid my expenses
and will put up money for the help of some of these people.

I'm sorry but I simply can't make money on these people.
That applies to your query about an article for a national
magazine.

So don't get me a job for a slick. I want to put a tag
of shame on the greedy bastards who are sisponsible for this
but I can best do it through newspapers.

Although Steinbeck hoped to produce some more articles, there are no
records of any appearing after his 1936 efforts. Even ije_never pub-
lished a Steinbeck article on the migrants. The magazine did use the
pictures, after The Grapes of Wrath was a best-selling novel and a
movie version had come out. Several photographs appeared in the
February 19, 1940 issue interspersed with stills from the film. The
idea was to show that the portrayal of the Joads in the movie was

authentic.35

 

33Ibid., p. 159.

34Ibid.. pp. 161-162.

35"Speaking of Pictures . . . These by Life Prove Facts in
Grapes of Wrath," Life, February 19, 1940, pp. lO-Il.

38

The Grapes of Wrath went through several drafts. In March,

1938, Steinbeck wrote Miss Otis that he destroyed the novel he had
been working on. He described it as being about vigilantes, local
Californians who harassed the migrants. He complained that he wasn't
making the progress he had hoped for:

I don't seem to know any more about writing a novel than I

did ten years ago. You'd think I would learn. I suppose

I could dash it off but I want this one to be a pretty good

one. There's another difficulty too. I'm trying to write 36

history while it is happening and I don't want to be wrong.
During the Spring of 1938 Steinbeck visited the migrants and worked on
the draft of his novel that was to become The Grapes of Wrath. He
wrote part of the novel in a country store near a Resettlement Admin-
istration camp, according to the recollections of Bud Campbell, who
came to the area with the migrant tides in 1935.

He said Steinbeck lived in a tent in the Sunset Camp down

the road for about six months and was a frequent visitor

to the store.

"Steinbeck sat there and wrote part of The Grapes of

Wrath in that little store," Mr. Campbell continued} "I

aon't know what he was doing, but he'd write on a big pad

of paper. He came back later and asked what I thought

about The Grapes of Wrath. I said it kind of lowered the

people and‘it kind’of lowered the state of Calggornia."

He said, "Yes, but it made me a lot of money."
He had earlier help from the Resettlement Administration in information
gathering. As mentioned above, Steinbeck met with Roy Stryker and
reviewed the Administration's picture file, which was filled with the

work of some of the nation's best photographers, who traveled around

 

36Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,

p. 162.

37Douglas E. Kneeland, "West Coast 'Okies' Recall Depression,
Scoff at Recession," New York Times, February 22, 1975, p. 32.

39

making a photographic record of the era. He also had help from the
San Francisco office of the Administration, which sent Steinbeck with
one of its workers on a field trip.

Steinbeck's information gathering in the field provided the
raw material for his novels In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath.
Being in the midst of his subject matter was both an aid and a handi-
cap. He had the benefit of being close to his subject, close enough
to observe the finest details. Yet there was a danger, he believed,
of losing perspective on the situation. He might grasp the immediate
picture, but lose sight of its meaning in the perspective of human
history. Steinbeck's aim in journalism was to influence public opin-
ion in order to help the migrants. His aim in his novels was to use
the specifics of life to illustrate the progress of mankind, to use
the microcosm to illustrate the macrocosm. Steinbeck explained this
in a letter to an editor in which he refused to write an article about
In Dubious Battle.

I wish I could write the article you suggest more for my own
good than for yours. But man! I don't know enough. There
are fine retirements into one terminology or another. I
haven't been able so to protect myself. The very frightened,
use the academy, research into one kind of microscopic detail
or another or bury themselves in some old time and its equip-
ment feeling safe because that time is over.

The changes go on so rapidly and it is so hard to see!

Sad that it will be so easy in fifty years. Of course there

is the larger picture one can feel. I suppose the appelations
communist and fascist are adequate. I don't really think they
are. I'm probably making a mistake in simply listening to men

talk, watching them act, hoping that the projection 36 the
microcosm will define the outlines of the macrocosm.

. 38John Steinbeck, "The Way it Seems to John Steinbeck,"
Occ1dent (Fall, 1936), p. 5.

40

Steinbeck was aware that he was attempting a large-scale task when he

wrote The Grapes of Wrath. His information gathering provided the raw

material for the novel. Steinbeck attempted to do more than describe

migrant life. He meant to describe the human condition. He alludes

to this in a letter to Pascal Covici:

And still one more thing-~I tried to write this book
the way lives are being lived not the way books are being
written.

This letter sounds angry. I don't mean it to be. I
know that books lead to a strong deep climax. This one
doesn't except by implication and the reader must bring
the implication to it. If he doesn't it wasn't a book for
him to read. Throughout I've tried to make the reader
participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will
be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There
are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many39
as he can and he won't find more than he has in himself.

 

178.

39Steinbeck and Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p.

CHAPTER III

JOURNALISM AND LITERATURE:
STEINBECK'S REPORTING AND THE GRAPES OF WRATH

 

Lots of folks back east, they say,
Leavin' home every day,

Beatin' a hot old dusty trail

To the California line.

Cross the desert sands they roll,

Gettin' out of the old dust bowl;

They think they're goin' to a sugar bowl;
Here's what they find:

The police at the port of entry say,
“You're number fourteen thousand for today:

If you ain't got the 00 Re Mi, bqys,

If you ain't got the 00 Re Mi,

Better go back to beautiful Texas,

Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.

A ragged man returning from California gives the Joad encamp-
ment exactly the advice expressed in this Woodie Guthrie song. The
ruined scarecrow who speaks in The Grapes of Wrath goes on to describe
how California's labor system exploits the workers, how growers try to
attract thousands of people to do the work of a few hundred, but the

advice he gives is the same as the song's.2

 

1Alan Lomax, comp., Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People,
notes by Woodie Guthrie, transcribed and e . y Pete Seeger (New York:
Oak Publications, 1967), pp. 230-231.

2John Steinbeck, The Gryapes of Wrath (New York: The Viking
Press, 1939), pp. 257-261.

41

42

The Grapes of Wrath does much more in its 619 pages than
point out the inequities of California's agricultural system. As
Steinbeck said in a letter to his publisher, there are five different

3 The five strands are skillfully interwoven to

levels to the novel.
compose the fabric of the novel. The most obvious level is the Joad
family's story, how the Joads left their home in Sallisaw, Oklahoma,
journeyed across the country to California, and once there, tried to
find work and settle down. Less obvious is the level of biblical
allegory. The Joad family's story is an allegory of the Exodus in
which the Dust Bowl is Egypt, the Joads' trip across Route 66 and the
California desert is like the Israelites' wanderings in the desert,
and the Joads' efforts to find work in California are like the Israel-
ites' battles for the land of Canaan.4
Another subtle theme running through The Grapes of Wrath is
that of Steinbeck's own philosophy or world-view. It was a natural-
istic philosophy derived from his readings and his studies of biology
and it envisioned society as an organic whole with individuals serving

as components of the larger being. In The Grapes of Wrath the opti-
mistic side of this philosophy is revealed. Society is depicted as

 

3Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A
Life in Letters (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), p. 178.

4H. Kelly Crockett, "The Bible and The Grapes of Wrath,"
College English, 1962, XXIV, 193-199.

43

making progress toward the surrender of individual goals in favor of
the advancement of all.5

On another level, The Grapes of Wrath is a documentary novel.
The Joads exemplified what was happening to thousands of Americans dur-
ing the 1930's. The fact that many shared the Joads' experiences is
demonstrated by Steinbeck's device of interchapters. These chapters
are interspersed throughout the novel, and they generalize about how
the conditions affecting the Joads affected the mass of people. The
combination of the Joads' experiences and the interchapters showed
that the book was not just the story of one family, but the chronicle
of American history.

By employing this double method, Steinbeck also did
what he could to protect himself against the attacks some
people launched against the book. By presenting the problems
he was concerned with in terms of their effect upon an indi-
vidual family, he forced his readers to visualize the
problems as they affected particular persons and denied them
the consolation of the sociology textbook that treats depressed
persons in numbers too large to be individually meaningful.

On the other hand, by using the generalized method, he
denied in advance the charge that the history of the Joads was
unique. By making what happened to the Joads representative
of general situations he depicted, he avoided precisely the
error made by those who attempted to "answer" The Grapes of
Wrath by presenting a unique case and implying it was typical.
In the interchapter Steinbeck found exactly the device he
needed to make his novel simultaneously a general and an
intensely personal history of the travails of a culture in
transition.

5Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The

Shaging of a Novelist (Minneapolis: *ihe University of Minnesota Press,
.PP

6Warren French, John Steinbeck (New York: Twayne Publishers,
Inc., 1961), pp. 96-97.

44

The technique of combining the particular and the general is like the
documentary filmmaker's technique. The interchapters are like broad
sweeps of the camera across the landscape which set the scene. The
focus on the Joad family is like the filmmaker's use of a particular
group of people to illustrate a general situation. In support of the
parallel between the form of The Grapes of Wrath and the documentary
film is the fact that the novel was smoothly transformed into a film
version in 1940, by 20th Century Fox for a screen version written by
Nunnally Johnson and directed by John Ford.7 In the film, devices
such as shots of tractor or jalopy caravans and sequences of passing
road signs, serve, like the interchapters to provide a general picture.

These devices have the effect of generalizing the
conflicts of the Joads, of making them representative of
typical problems in a much wider social context. In every
reversal, in gvery act of oppression, we feel the pressure
of thousands.

Steinbeck also seems to have employed his concept of a combination of
novel and play which he first attempted with Of Mice and Men. The.
Grapes of Wrath contains dialog which translates easily to the screen
and descriptions which serve as settings and stage directions.

Except for the freewheeling omniscience of the inter-
chapters, the novel's prose relies wholly on dialogue and
physical action to reveal character. Because Steinbeck's
style is not marked by meditation, it resembles, in this

respect, the classic form of the scenario. Even at moments
of highest tension, Steinbeck scrupulously avoids getting

 

7George Bluestone, "Novel into Film: The Grapes of Wrath,"

in A Com anion to The Gra es of Wrath, ed. by Warren French (New York:
The Viking Press, 1963). PP. 165-166.

8mm. p. 182.

45

inside the minds of people. . . . Although this is Steinbeck's
characteristic style, it can also serve as precise directions
for the actor. There is nothing here that cannot be turned
into images of physical reality. Critics who seem surprised
at the ease with which Steinbeck's work moves from one medium
to another may find their explanation here. Precisely this
fidelity to physical detail was responsible, for example, for
the success of Of Mics and Men first as a novel, then as a
play, then as a film.

Another level of the novel, and one which it has in common

with some of the great documentaries is the fact that it stirred up a

reaction. These ranged from denials of the facts from Oklahoma,10 case

histories of happy. successful migrants, such as Grapes of Gladness,H

to sarcastic attacks such as the one called The Wrath of John Stein-

]2 Two Congressional investigations

peek, or St. John Goes to Church.
were spurred by the book, The United States Senate Education and Labor
Committee, Hearings on Violations of Free Speech and Assembly and
Infractions of the Rights of Labor,13 and the U.S. House Select Com-

mittee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens.14

 

9151a., p. 183.

10Martin S. Shockley, "The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in
Oklahoma," American Literature, XV, 1944, pp. 351-361.

1lMarshall V. Hartrangt, Grapes of Gladness (Los Angeles: De
Vorss & Co., 1939).

12Robert Bennett, The Wrath of John Steinbeck, or St. John
Goes to Church (Los Angeles: Alherson Press, I939), (pamphlet).

13U.S., Congress, Senate, Education and Labor Committee, Hear-
in s on Violations of Free 5 eech and Assembly and Infractions of the

R1 ts of‘Labor,T§arts 4 - (Washihgton, . .: Government Printing
Oiiice, 1939-1940 .

14U.S., Congress, House, Select Committee to Investigate the
Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, Reports of Hearings in
Cumulative Index of the 74th to the 85th Congress (Washington, D.C.:
Government PFintingTOT?ice, 1959).

46

In The Grapes of Wrath these five strands are woven into
whole cloth thanks to Steinbeck's skillful writing, fueled by the
energy of his great compassion and concern for the migrant people.
Steinbeck's feelings for the migrants are evident in his journalistic
work done in the Fall of 1936. First, in his article for the Natjgg,
"Dubious Battle in California," which appeared in the September 12,
1936 issue, Steinbeck turned his attention from the strikes that
wracked California agriculture to the people who were involved in
them.

The article provides a brief description of the agriculture
system in California from Steinbeck's point of view. It tells that
most of the farms were owned by large growers and farmed by hired
migrant labor. The migrants had come from a stream of foreign minori-
ties, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Mexicans since the 19th century.
In his 1936 article Steinbeck notices an addition to the migrant popula-
tion, Americans from the South and Midwest who came to California in
the wake of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

As the Mexicans were trying to unionize, the growers were
trying to have them deported, Steinbeck noted. The growers took
advantage of the American families, desperate for work, who entered
California during the Mexican drive for unionization. Steinbeck saw
the Americans trying to organize for their own protection as well.

The usual repressive measures have been used against these
migrants: shooting by deputy sheriffs in "self-defense,"
jailing without charge, refusal of trial by jury, torture
and beating by night riders. But even in the short time

that these American migrants have been out here there has
been a change. It is understood that they are being attacked

47

not because they want higher wages, not because they age

Communists, but simply because they want to organize.
Steinbeck's notice shifted from the labor picture of In Dubious Battle
to the common troopers whose fate would be affected by the struggle.

Unlike the Chinese and the Filipinos, the men rarely come

alone. They bring wives and children, now and then a few

chickens and their pitiful household goods, though in most

cases these have been sold to buy gasoline for the trip.

It is quite usual for a man, his wife, and from three to

eight children to arrive in California with no possessions

but the rattletrag car they travel in and the ragged clothes

on their bodies.
The picture Steinbeck painted of the welcome these families found in
California was not a pleasant one. They could live in a few camps with
sanitary facilities and a place to pitch their tents, but most farms
didn't even have facilities up to this standard. Some farms charged
rent for the shacks they provided, or they deducted the rent from
wages. Migrants couldn't collect relief because they couldn't meet
county residency requirements. They lived in squalor and poverty,
with the family earning from $150 to $400 per year. Health conditions
were bad and epidemics were hard to fight.

Former small farmers and farm hands from the Midwest wouldn't
be intimidated as easily as the foreign-born migrants, Steinbeck said.
In the first place, the migrants are undeniably American and
not deportable. In the second place, they were not lured to

California by a promise of good wages, but are refugees as
surely as though they had fled from destruction by an invader.

In the third place, they are not drawn from a peon class, but
have either owned small farms or been farm hands in the early

 

15John Steinbeck, "Dubious Battle in California," Nation,
September 12, 1936, p. 304.

16Ipid., p. 303.

48

American sense, in which the "hand" is a member of the
employing family. They have one fixed idea, and that is
to acquire land and settle on it. Probably the most
important difference is that they are not easily intimi-
dated. They are courageous, intelligent, and resourceful.
Having gone through the horrors of the drought and with
immense effort having escaped from it, they cannot be
herdeg7 attacked, starved, or frightened as all the others
were.

Steinbeck ended the article by portraying the state of California as
the site of opposing camps arming themselves for war. He expresses
the hope that such war may be averted.

There is now in California anger instead of fear. The
stupidity of the large grower has changed terror into
defensive fury. The granges, working close to the soil
and to the men, and knowing the temper of the men of this
new race, have tried to put through wages that will allow
a living, however small. But the large growers, who have
been shown to be the only group making a considerable profit
from agriculture, are devoting their money to tear gas and
rifle ammunition. The men will organize and the large
growers will meet organization with force. It is easy to
prophesy this. In Kern County the grange has voted $1 a
hundred pounds for cotton pickers for the first picking.
The Associated Farmers have not yielded from seventy-five
cents. There is tension in the valley, and fear for the
future.

It is fervently to be hoped that the great group of
migrant workers so necessary to the harvesting of California
crops may be given the right to live decently, that they may
not be so badgered, tormented, and hurt that in the end they
become avengers of the hundreds of thousands who have been
tortured and starved before them. 8

The article "Dubious Battle in California," took the form of
an essay which explained why, in Steinbeck's opinion, a conflict
between migrants and growers was brewing in California. First, he

analyzed the structure of California agriculture, its domination by

 

l7I
18

0'

id.

Ibi

D.

., p. 304.

49

the large landowners and its dependence on the exploitation of labor.
Then he explained the position of the latest migrant group. He des-
cribed the pressures that were building as a result of the latest entry
of American migrants into the existing system. His conclusion was that
tensions were building toward open conflict. His ideas on possible
solutions are also present in the article. He suggested solutions in
several passages of the article: that agriculture should be reformed
to offer workers decent wages and adequate living conditions.
Steinbeck's attitudes and personal concerns are evident in

the article. It begins with a measured, explanatory tone as he reviews
the past and begins describing the present situation. His feelings
toward the large landowners who exploited the workers are evident in a
sarcastic descriptive passage about one farm.

One such ranch, run by a very prominent man, has neat single-

room houses built of whitewashed adobe. They are said to have

cost $500 apiece. They are rented for $5 a month. This ranch

pays twenty cents an hour as opposed to the thirty cents paid

at other ranches and indorsed by the grange in the community.

Since this rugged individual is saving 33 l/3 percent of his

labor cost and still charging $5 a month rent for his houses,

it will be readily seen that he is getting a very fair return

on his money besides being generally praised as a philanthropist.

The reputation of this ranch, however, is that the migrants

stay only long enough to get money to buy gasoline with, and

then move on. 9
Another characteristic of Steinbeck's article is his chauvinisn on
behalf of native-born American workers. He calls them "courageous,

intelligent, and resourceful . . . not easily intimidated."20 His

 

50

sympathy goes to the family groups with their "pitiful household

21

goods. . . rattletrap car . . . and ragged clothes." The article

ends with the "fervent hope" that migrants will be treated decently
and conflict will be avoided.22

It was also during the Fall of 1936 that Steinbeck produced
a series of news articles for the San Francisco News at the request of
Associate Editor George West, who was Steinbeck's friend. Steinbeck
visited King's County, where 3,000 people had been caught in heavy
rains. They were living on high ground amidst soaked and flooded
fields. Steinbeck produced a seven-part series for the San Francisco
Ne!§_called "California's Harvest Gypsies." The series ran from Mon-
day, October 5 to Monday, October 12, 1936, excluding Sunday. It got
moderately prominent play in the newspaper. Each section of the series
appeared at the top, center of its page underneath a headline that
varied in size each day from 24 to 36 points. There was a kicker
after each headline amplifying upon it. The series never made page
one, but the first two sections made page three and the third, page
six. The next three sections dropped back to pages l6, l4 and 14
respectively, and the concluding part was on page 8. Each section
appeared under Steinbeck's byline and a short paragraph by the editor
to introduce him to the readers.

John Steinbeck, author of "Tortilla Flat" and other

books, followed the people who follow the crops in Cali-
fornia, to see their working and living conditions. He

 

2‘Ipi

22 b

G.

0-4
G.

51

tells his story at first hand. Migrant labor is at once the

salvation of the fruit and vegetable farmer, and the most

Egpggtagg social-economic problem faced by the state.--The

Each section of the series was illustrated with one to four
photographs of the people and scenes described in it. The photographer
or photographers did not get credit lines. The photograph which illus-
trates the first part of the series is unmistakably Dorothea Lange's
classic photograph “Migrant Mother." Miss Lange was working for the
Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration,
as one of the team of photographers working under Roy Stryker. She
was the only member of the photography group working on the West Coast.
In the photograph a worried, worn-looking woman wearing a checked dress
and a sweater holds an infant on her lap. A shaggy-haired child leans
his head on her shoulder. The caption in the San Francisco News reads:
"The family of a Nipomo pea picker--a 'picture story' of child inno-
cence and maternal apprehension. How long here--and where to next?“24
Analysis of the series reveals its relationship to The Grapes

of Wrath. The series is related to the novel in the same way an art-
ist's charcoal or pencil sketches are a preparation for a magnificent
landscape painted in oils. Echoes of the series abound in the novel
in descriptive passages and statements by the characters.

Chapter I of the series contains the germs of many themes

and incidents that were to flower in the novel. It is an overview of

 

23John Steinbeck, "California's Harvest Gypsies," San Fran-
cisco News, October 5, 1936, p. 3.

24mid.

52

California agriculture, and in it Steinbeck poses and answers the
question, who are the migrant workers? He proposes, "Let us see what
kind of people they are, Where they come from, and the routes of their
wanderings."25 To answer this question in the novel, The Grapes of
Wrath, Steinbeck used about twenty of the book's thirty chapters.

Steinbeck establishes early in Chapter I of the series that
migrant labor is necessary to harvest California's crops, and that it
is seasonal labor, requiring hundreds of workers one week and only a
dozen the next on a particular farm. In Chapter I of the series, and
later, in the novel, Steinbeck states that the newest wave of migrants
are Americans, unlike the foreign-born workers of the past, and they
are refugees from the Dust Bowl. He emphasizes their good qualities,
that they are proud, hard-working people with a special feeling of
closeness to the land. Steinbeck says that such a feeling is alien
to the huge farms of California and the increasingly mechanized enter-
prises in the Midwest. He also says that the incoming migrants are
met with hatred and derision because they are the hungry strangers who
seem to pose a threat to native Californians.

He tells why migrants left their homes in Chapter I of the
series:

They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or

farm hands who have lived with the family in the old American
way. They are men who have worked hard on their own farms

and have felt the pride of possessing and living in close
touch with the land.

 

25

53

They are resourceful and intelligent Americans who have

gone through the hell of the drought, have seen the top soil

blow away; and this, to a man who has owned his land, is a

curious and terrible pain.2
The first eleven chapters of The Grapes of Wrath describe in detail how
the Joads and others like them were driven from their land by the soil
erosion and the nation's tough economic conditions. Chapter I of the
novel, an introductory interchapter, describes the dust storms, the
final result of gradual land erosion after the grasses were plowed off
the prairies. It describes how the dust killed off the young corn
crop and left the desperate farm people wondering what to do. "After
a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity

27 Tom Joad observes the

and became hard and angry and resistant."
ruined corn and sparse cotton rows on his way home from McAlester
prison. "'Ever' year,’ said Joad. 'Ever' year I can remember, we had
a good crop comin an' it never come. Granpa says she was good the
first five plowin's, while the wild grass was still in her.'“28

Another point made in Chapter I of the series is that,
small farmers, the people who became migrants had no contact with the
industrialization of farming until they were tractored off their land
or they saw the gigantic farming operations in California.

And they are strangely anachronistic in one way: having

been brought up in the prairies where industrialization never

penetrated, they have jumped with no transition from the old
agrarian, self-containing farm where nearly everything used

 

26Ipid.

27

281bid., p. 37.

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 6.

54

was raised or manufactured, to a system of agriculture so
industrialized that the man who plants a crop does not often
see, let alone harvest, the fruit of his plantgng, where the
migrant has no contact with the growth cycle.

In contrast to the small farmer's closeness to the land, the men on
tractors in The Grapes of Wrath are unfeeling toward the work they
are doing. After the banks took over the mortgaged farms, or land-
lords dismissed the sharecroppers, the tractors arrived.

He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell
the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or
feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron
seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat
or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or
trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped, did not germi-
nate, it was nothing. If the young thrusting plant withered
in drought or drowned in a floog of rain it was no more to
the driver than to the tractor. 0

Tom Joad arrives at his family's farm later in the novel only to find
the land plowed over, the house smashed by the tractor and the family
gone.3]

Steinbeck exalts the pioneer roots of the migrants. He
traces them back to their ancestors who first settled on the plains.
He praises them and attaches the same aura of romance and legend to
them as is associated with the American pioneer saga. In Chapter I
of the series he repeats this theme several times.

Often they patched the worn-out tires every few miles.

They have weathered the thing, and they can weather much
more for their blood is strong.

 

29Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies,“ Ibid.

30$teinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 48.

3'Ibid.. p. 54.

55

They are descendents of men who crossed into the middle
west, who won their lands by fighting, who cultivated the
grairies and stayed with them until they went back to the

esert.

And because of their tradition and their training, they
are not migrants by nature. They are gypsies by force of
circumstances . . .

The names of the new migrants indicate that they are of
English, German and Scandinavaan descent. There are Munns,
Holbrooks, Hansens, Schmidts. ‘

The farm families in The Grapes of Wrath are, like the people described
in the series, of pioneer stock. In an interchapter, Steinbeck des-
cribes men thinking: "Grandpa took up the land, and he had to kill the

Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds

33

and snakes." In a later interchapter, Steinbeck has the migrant des-

cribe his long roots in America. "We ain't foreign. Seven generations
back Americans, and beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One

of our folks in the Revolution, an' they was lots of our folks in the

Civil War--both sides. Americans."34

Another theme in Chapter I of the series that appears in the
Grapes of Wrath is the hatred and fear which the Californians felt
toward the migrants. In the series Steinbeck explains:

Thus, in California we find a curious attitude toward

a group that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants
are needed, and they are hated. Arriving in a district they
find the dislike always meted out by the resident to the
foreigner, the outlander. This hatred of the stranger occurs
in the whole range of human history, from the most primitive
village form to our own highly organized industrial farming.
The migrants are hated for the following reasons, that they

 

32Steinbeck, “Harvest Gypsies," Ibid.

33Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 45.

34Ibid., pp. 317-318.

56

are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of
disease, that they increase the necessity for police and
the tax bill for schooling in a community, and if they are
allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work,
wipe out the season's crops. They are never received into
a community nor into the life of a community. Wanderers
in fact, they are never allowed to feel at home in the
communities that demand their services.

In an interchapter of The Grapes of Wrath Californians use

the very words Steinbeck used in Chapter I of the series when they des-

n36

cribe the migrants as "Outlanders, foreigners. Just after the Joads

cross the California border they meet a disappointed man returning from
the state who told them:

They hate you 'cause they're scairt. They know a hungry
fella gonna get food even if he got to take it. They know
that fallow lan' s a sin an' somebody' gonna take it. What
the hell' You never been called "Okie" yet. . .

Well Okie use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it
means you're a dirty son-of-a- bitch. Okie means you're scum.
Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it.37

As the Joads set out to cross the desert into California's agricultural
valleys, two gas station attendants remark after the departing family:

Them Okies? They're all hard-lookin'.

"Jesus, I'd hate to start out in a jalopy like that."

"Well you and me got sense. Them goddam Okies got no sense
and no feeling. They ain't human. A human being couldn't
stand it to be so dirty and miggrable. They ain't a hell
of a lot better than gorillas.

 

35Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," Ibid.

36

37Ibid., p. 280.

38Ibid., p. 301.

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 321.

57

In Chapter I of the series Steinbeck described the labor
situation that migrants found in California. The labor was seasonal,
requiring many workers at harvest time and only a few during the rest
of the year. Migrants, often many more than were needed, flocked to
areas where there was rumored to be work. Since there were so many
workers, the landowners could offer a very low wage and the migrants
would accept it. In the series Chapter I Steinbeck gave an example:

For example, a large peach orchard which requires the work of

20 men the year round will need as many as 2,000 for the brief

time of picking and packing. And if the migration of the

2,000 should not occur, if it Should be delayed even a week,

the crop will rot and be lost. 9
In The Grapes of Wrath Tom Joad meets a young man in a Hooverville who
explains the labor situation in phrases very similar to the description
in the series. '

"They's a big son-of-a-bitch of a peach orchard I worked in.

Takes nine men all the year roun'." He paused impressively.

"Takes three thousan' men for two weeks when them Beaches

is ripe. Got to have 'em or them peaches'll rot.4

In Chapter II of the series Steinbeck focused on a specific
area of migrant life. He described living conditions in a Hooverville.
He described three families who occupied a camp, each one presenting
a more advance stage of deterioration in its physical condition, liv-
ing quarters and morale. In The Grapes of Wrath the Joads' camp at a

Hooverville which is similar to the one described in the series.

39Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," Ibid.
40Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 335.

58

The three families Steinbeck described in Chapter II of the
series are called the upper class, middle class and lower class of
the camps. The upper class family has been in the camps the shortest
amount of time. It has tried to construct a house out of corrugated
paperboard, but the house will be washed away in the first downpour.
The parents have tried to keep their home and their clothes clean and
they send their children to school when they are in one place long
enough. Their first worry is finding food.

Here in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to

see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry

but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds in against

the borders of the camp. . . . He is a newcomer and his

spirit and his decency ang his sense of his own dignity have

not been quite wiped out. 1
The second family lives in a ragged tent, and there is one bed for the
six people. Neither the cooking utensils nor the children have been
cleaned. The children hide instead of going to school because the
teachers resent them and the other children jeer at them. The father
is a slow worker because his strength has eroded and his spirit is
breaking, thus his earning power is reduced.

The dullness shows in the faces of this family, and in

addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn.

This is the middle class of the squatters' camp. In a

few months this family will slip down to the lower class.

Dignity is all ggne, and spirit has turned to sullen
anger before it dies. 2

 

4lSteinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," San Francisco News, October
6, 1936, p. 3.

421 id.

59

The third family, which represents the lower class of camp dwellers,
lives in a house of willow branches driven into the ground and filled
in with wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet. The
three-year-old child who sits in front of the dwelling is described
as near death. He has malnutrition and he lacks the energy to brush
flies away from his face. His mother has recently given birth to a
dead baby. Cleanliness and sanitary habits have been completely
abandoned by this family. The father is described as completely lack-
ing in the will to persist under these conditions.
The husband was a share-crapper once, but he couldn't make
it go. Now he has lost even the desire to talk.
He will not look directly at you, for that requires
will, and will needs strength.
But he hasn't the will nor the energy to resist. Too
many things have happened to him. This is the lower class
of the camp.
Outsiders are received suspiciously in the squatters' camp because they
bring trouble, according to the series. The sheriff raids the camp
occasionally and if there is labor trouble, vigilantes may burn down
the entire camp. Steinbeck said that camp conditions make the people
so desperate that they may even break the law.
And if these men steal. If there is developing among
them a suspicion and hatred of well-dressed, satisfied people,
the reason is not to be sought in their axigin nor in any
tendency to weakness in their character.
In Chapter 20 of The Grapes of Wrath the Joads camp overnight

in a Hooverville. It is described in a realistic manner in the novel

 

43
44

I

0'

id.

I

0'

id.

60

as compared to the description by example in the series. The action
that takes place in the Hooverville is like a dramatization of the
series Chapter II. As the Joads enter the camp they see a collection
of dwellings like those described in the series.

There was no order in the camp; little gray tents,
shacks, cars were scattered about at random. The first
house was nondescript. The south wall was made of three
sheets of rusty corrugated iron, the east wall a square
of moldy carpet tacked between two boards, the north wall
a strip of roofing paper and a strip of tattered canvas,
and the west wall six pieces of gunny sacking. Over the
square frame, on untrimmed willow limbs, grass had been
piled, not thatched, but heaped up in a low mound. . . .

Next to the shack there was a little tent, gray with
weathering, but neatly, properly set up; and the boxes in
front of it were placed against the tent wall. A stovepipe
stuck out of the door flap, and the dirt in front of the
tent had been swept and sprinkled. A bucketful of soaking
clothes stood on a box. The camp was neat and sturdy. A
Model A roadster and a little homemade bed trailer stood
beside the tent.

And next there was a huge tent, ragged, torn in strips
and the tears mended with pieces of wire. The flaps were
up, and inside four wide mattresses lay on the ground. A
clothes line strung along the igde bore pink cotton dresses
and several pairs of overalls.

This description of the Hooverville in the novel demonstrates the three
classes of people in the camps just as the series does. The lowest
class comes first in the passage above, the upper class second and the
middle class third. As in the series, the condition of the dwellings
indicates the condition of the people.

When the Joads first enter the camp they encounter people

who have been beaten into submission like the lower class camp dwellers.

 

45Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 328-329.

61

The flaps of the first shack parted and a woman looked
out. Her gray hair was braided, and she wore a dirty,
flowered Mother Hubbard. Her face was wizened and dull,
deep gray pouches under blank eyes, and a mouth slack and
loose.46
The woman's husband is incapable of answering Pa Joad's questions about

the camp. A young man explains that the old is "bull-simple."47 He

says, "I guess cops push 'im aroun' so much he's still spinning."48
Later in Chapter 20 of the novel, as Steinbeck mentioned in
the series, a contractor and a sheriff's deputy visit the squatters'
camp, ostensibly to round up workers for a harvest in another area.
They meet quiet resistance from most of the migrants and open opposi—
tion from Tom Joad. Tom hits the deputy, knocking him out, after the
man tries to arrest his friend, Floyd Knowles, who questions the con-
tractor's tactics. The deputy also fires his gun in the camp, shooting
off a woman's fingers. Casy the preacher claims that he, not Tom, hit
the deputy, and is taken away by four armed men. The Joads pack up
and leave the camp because they realize that the armed men will probably
return. As the Joads drive away from the camp they can hear people
screaming, and see the flames flare and spread as the remaining migrants

are burned out. Floyd Knowles explains why the police may be harassing

the migrants.

 

62

Some says they don' want us to vote; keep us movin' so we
can't vote. An' some says if we set in one place we'd get

organized. I don' know why. I on'y know we get rode all
the time. . . .49

The theme of lawlessness is introduced in Chapter II of the
series. Steinbeck concluded the chapter by stating that the migrants
may break the law because they are desperate, not because they are
scoffers. As the Joads are leaving the Hooverville, Tom expresses

his hostilities to Ma.

"Ma," he said, "if it was the law they was workin' with,

why, we could take it. But it ain't the law. They're

a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a-tryin' to make

us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to

break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they come atime when the

on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock

at a cop. They're workin' on our decency."

Ma said, "You promised Tom, That's how Pretty Boy

Floyd done. I knowed his ma. They hurt him."50
This statement is a foreshadowing of what will happen to Tom during the
course of the novel. He tries to join Casy in a meeting to organize
migrant labor. When Casy is killed, Tom kills his assilant and be-

comes a fugitive.

In other cases in the novel, the law is broken because the
migrants can't afford the niceties of society. They are forced to
ignore regulations because they have no choice. After Rose of
Sharon's baby is born dead Uncle John is asked to bury the body. He

protests that it's against the law to bury a body without the county's

 

491mm. pp. 332-333.

5°Ipid., p. 381.

63

authority. Someone remarks, in reply, "They's lots of things 'gainst
the law that we can't he'p doin'."5]

In Chapter III of the series Steinbeck explained the power
structure of California agriculture. He discussed the control mechan-
isms of the large landowners and businesses which led to the condi-
tions faced by the Joads and others like them. Steinbeck explained
that most of the farmland in California was divided into huge tracts
owned by absentee landlords and corporations. Small farmers, those
with 5 to 100 acres, tried to treat the migrants humanely and often
sided with them in labor disputes. In spite of their sympathies, the
small farmers had to work within the system to stay in business. They
depended on the banks for loans, and the banks might have been land-
lords themselves. Bank officers might have been landlords or the
banks might have depended on farmers' associations for their business.
The small farmer might have been locked into the system against his
will.

As a result the large farms were run by superintendents who
were only doing a job, not carrying responsibility for the treatment
of people. In the series Steinbeck described the housing that might
be provided on a large fann.

The houses, one-room shacks usually about 10 by 12 feet, have
no rug, no water, no bed. In one corner there is a little

iron wood stove. hater must be carried from a faucet at the
end of the street. .

 

51

52Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," San Francisco News, October
7, 1936, p. 6.

Ibid., p. 608.

 

64

The Joad family is given a house like this one when it starts work at
a peach orchard in Chapter 26 of the novel.
Ma opened the door of the house and stepped inside. The
floor was splashed with grease. In the one room stood a
rusty tin stove with nothing more. The tin stove rested on
ii!’.~3§$°§ieiiia'§i £323 2.135522%???“ "" “mg“ “‘8 "°°"
Steinbeck described in the series how the migrants are further
brought under the landowner's control by the credit system. The farm
store extended credit to the migrants and they bought their food on
credit. Often the wages they earned didn't keep pace with the credit
they owed. Ma Joad encounters a situation like this at the peach
orchard. The entire family's earnings for a day of picking peaches
amount to a dollar. Ma Joad goes to the nearest store, which is owned
by the ranch, to buy food for supper. She finds that the food items
are inferior in quality and higher in price than the goods she could
get in town. She uses the entire dollar to buy bread, meat, potatoes
and coffee. Even though this is the best meal the Joads have eaten
in some days, the portions are small and the family's hunger isn't
completely satisfied.54
Tom Joad encounters a small farmer who is locked into the
system. The farmer treats him fairly and wants to pay him a decent

wage for digging a ditch. Then the farmer explains that he has to

reduce the wages because of pressure from the Farmers Association.

 

53Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 504.

54Ibid.. pp. 510-517.

65

Now do you know who runs the Farmers Association? I'll tell
you. The Bank of the West. That bank owns most of this
valley, and it's got paper on everything it doesn't own.

So last night the member from the bank told me, he said,
"You're paying thirty cents an hour. You'd better cut it
down to twenty-five.' I said, 'I've got good men. They're
worth thirty.‘ And he says, 'It isn't that,‘ he says. 'The
wage is twenty-five now. If you pay thirty, it'll only cause
unrest. And by the way,‘ he says, 'you ggtng to need the
usual amount for a crop loan next year?'"

In the series Steinbeck described the conditions on the large
ranches. He said that hatred and suspicion among the workers and their
employers was growing. Some farms or ranches turned into armed camps
where terror not only prevented revolts, but complaints.

The will of the ranch owner, then is law; for these deputies

are always on hand, their guns conspicuous. A disagreement

constitutes resisting an officer. A glance at the list of

migrants shot during a single year in California for "resist-

ing an officer" will give a fair idea 8f the casualness of

these "officers" in shooting workers.5
The Joads encounter terrorism of this sort when they go to work on the
peach orchard in Chapter 26 of The Grapes of Wrath. When the Joads
arrive at the orchard they are quizzical about the armed men they see
near the entrance. They don't realize that they are unwitting strike-
breakers until later. They are shown to their quarters by two men
armed with shotguns. Guards with guns patrol the camp's living
quarters.57

Chapter IV of the series describes the government camps set

up by the federal government's Resettlement Administration. There

 

55Ibid.. p. 402.

56Steinbeck, ”Harvest Gypsies," Ibid.

57Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 503-504.

66

were several such camps established in California in the 1930's to
offer migrants a wholesome place to live, like the camp at Arvin, Cali-

fornia managed by Steinbeck's friend, Tom Collins. In The Grapes of

 

Wrath Ma meets the camp manager, Jim Rawley, whose portrait Steinbeck

may have based on Collins.

A little man dressed all in white stood behind her--a man with

a thin, brown, lined face and merry eyes. He was lean as a

picket. His white clean clothes were frayed at the seams.

He smiled at Ma. "Good morning," he said.58
Ma's initial suspicion changes to joy after she realizes that Jim Raw-
ley is treating her in a friendly, respectful manner.59

Chapter IV of the series provides a description of the camp's

physical facilities, social organization and accomplishments. Chapters
22 and 24 of The Grapes of Wrath portray just such a camp in action.
The camps described in the series and the novel had basically the same
physical setups. Each family was provided with a place to pitch its
tent. Communal sanitary facilities included washrooms, toilets and
showers. There was a sanitary facility for each block of tents. Both
the camp in the series and the camp in the novel had entertainment
facilities. In the novel there was an open-air platform for dances
and a croquet court. In the series the camp had some courts for games,
which were built by the inhabitants, in addition to a place for enter-

tainment. Individual garden plots for subsistence farming had also

been started in the camp described in the series.

 

581bid., p. 415.

591bid.. pp. 415-417.

67

Social organization of the camps as described in both the
series and the novel is practically identical. The camp inhabitants
were responsible for the maintenance and government of the camps.

They had to keep the facilities clean, and they were offered the option
of paying a low weekly rent or doing chores if they couldn't afford

the rent. Camp members elected representatives to a central governing
committee. The committee created and enforced the rules. It had the
power to first reprimand, and then eject any camp dweller who broke

the rules. A group of women called the Good Neighbors in the series
and the Ladies' Committee in the book helped newcomers get settled

and made sure they had sufficient food, clothing and household goods.

Steinbeck pointed out in the series that the camps had their
own democratic, effective form of order.

The result of this responsible self-government has been

remarkable. The inhabitants of the camp came here beaten,
sullen and destitute. But as their social sense was revived
they have settled down. The camp takes care of its own des-
titute, feeding and sheltering those who have nothing with
their own poor stores. The central committee makes the laws
that govern the conduct of the inhabitants.

In the year that the Arvin camp has been in operation
there has not been any need for outside police. Punishments
are the restrictions of certain privileges such as admission
to the community dances, or for continued anti-social condict,
a recommendatigB to the manager that the culprit be ejected
from the camp.

This order is tested in Chapter 24 of The Grapes of Wrath. The camp
is holding its Saturday night dance and Tom receives a warning that

vigilantes are planning to disrupt the dance, providing an excuse for

 

60Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," San Francisco News, October
8, 1936, p. 16.

68

deputies to raid the camp. Tom tells the Central Committee, which
organizes patrols. The patrols manage to intercept the vigilantes
before they can start fights. They eject the vigilantes from the camp

and the armed men waiting outside have no pretext for entering the

camp.61

Steinbeck explained what he meant by dignity in Chapter IV
of the series. In Chapter II of the series he had introduced the theme
of dignity, showing how a person's dignity deteriorated along with his
living conditions. In Chapter IV he defined dignity as each person's
sense of worth which enabled him to live in human society.

In this series the word "dignity" has been used several
times. It has been used not as some attitude of self-importance,
butisimply as a register of a man's responsibility to the com-
mun ty.

A man herded about, surrounded by armed guards, starved
and forced to live in filth loses his dignity; that is, he loses
his valid position in regard to society, and consequently his
whole ethics toward society. Nothing is a better example of
this than the prison, Where the men are reduced to no dignity
and where crimes and infractions of rule are constant.

We regard this destruction of dignety, (sic) then, as one
of the most regrettable results of the migrant's life since it
does reduce his responsibility and does make him a sullen out-
cast whgzwill strike at our government in any way that occurs
to him.

In this passage Steinbeck made it clear that he was not a radical or
revolutionary who wanted American society to be destroyed. He saw
faults in the society and he wanted them corrected so all people could
share in its rewards. Steinbeck praised the camps in Chapter IV of the

series for helping the migrants regain their dignity and rejoin society.

 

61
62

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 452-472.

Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," Ibid.

69

He also said he hoped the camp system would be expanded and would
provide long-term homes for migrant families with the addition of
small farm plots.

They will allow the women and children to stay in one
place, permitting the children to go to school and the women
to maintain the farms during the work times of the men.

They will reduce the degenerating effect of the migrants'
life, they will reinstil (sic) the sense of government and
possession that have been lost by the migrants.

Located near to the areas which demand seasonal labor,
these comnuni ties will permit these subsistence farmers to
work in the harvests, while at the same time they stop the
wanderings over the whole state. The success of these
Federal camps in making potential criminals into citizens
makes the usual practice of expending money on tear gas seem
a little silly.5

Steinbeck continued to say that the camp system would destroy the argu-
ments of those who objected to it. The hiring of extra police would
not be necessary because the camps could keep their own order. Extra
school costs should be borne by the community, he said, as a social
responsibility to the workers who made the agriculture system possible.
The camps would not lower land values, he said, because standards of
cleanliness would be maintained.64 Steinbeck closed Chapter IV of the
series by refuting a newspaper editor's arguments against the camps.
The fourth argument, as made by the editor of the Yuba
City Herald, a self-admitted sadist who wrote a series of
incendiary and subversive editorials concerning the Marys-
ville camp, is that these are the breeding places for strikes.
Under pressure of evidence the Yuba City patriot with-
drew his contention that the camp was full of radicals. This

will be the argument used by the speculative growers' associa-
tions. These associations have said in so many words that

 

63
64

I

0'

id.

H

hi

0.

70

they require a peon class to succeed. Any action to better

the cggdition of the migrants will be considered radical to

them.
In The Grapes of Wrath the government camp does not solve the Joad
family's problems. Since they can't get enough work in the area near
the camp, they decide to move on in search of jobs.

Chapter V of the series described California's relief program
and the problem of poor diet, which hastened the migrants' downward
spiral. The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath did not get involved with
the relief system as described in the series, but they did suffer from
the effects of a poor diet.

The inability to procure a wholesome diet was caused by the
migrants' low and irregular income.

According to several Government and state surveys and

studies of large numbers of migrants, the maximum a worker
can make is $400 a year, while the average is around $300,
and the large minimum is $150 a year. This amount must feed,
clothe and transport whole families.

Sometimes whole families are able to work in the fields,

thus making an additional wage. In other observed cases, a

whole family, weakened by sickness and malnutrition has worked

in the fields, making less than the wage of one healthy man.

It does not take long at the migrants' work to reduce the

health of any family. Food is scarce always, and luxuries of

any kind are unknown.6
The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath follow the same pattern. The richness
of their diet depends on whether they can get work. The longer they
are in California, searching for work, eating poorly, the weaker they

get, which impairs their earning power. At the Hooverville Ma manages

 

65

66Steinbeck, “Harvest Gypsies," San Francisco News, October

Ibi

D.

9, 1936, p

71

to prepare a stew of meat and potatoes. There is little enough for the

family, but she gives some to the Hooverville children who stand by

67

hungrily while she cooks. The next morning in the government camp

Ma prepares corn pone, which is fried cornmeal dough, and gravy with

coffee for the family's breakfast.68 Tom finds work the first day at

the government camp so Ma feels she can afford a good dinner. She
says:

"John, you go find Pa. Get to the store. I want beans an'
sugar an'--a piece of fryin' meat an' carrots an' tell Pa
to get somepin nice-~anything--but nice--for tonight.
Tonight--we'll have--somepin nice."

Tom is the only Joad who can get work during the Joads' month-long stay
at the migrant camp and the family is weakened from poor diet.

"We got to do somepin,“ she said. And she pointed at
Winfield. "Look at 'im," she said. And when they stared
at the little boy, "He's a-jerkin' an' a-twisten' in his
sleep. Lookut his color." The members of the family looked
at the earth again in shame. “Fried dough," Ma said. "One
month we been here. An' Tom had five days' work. An' the
rest of you scrabblin' out ever' day, an no work. An' scairt
to talk. An' the money gone. You're scairt to talk it out.
Well, you got to. Rosasharn ain't far from due, an' lookut
her color. You got to talk it out. Now don't none of you
get up till we figger sonepin out. One day' more grease an'
two daya' flour, an' ten potatoes. You set here an' get
usy!"

The Joads leave the government camp and get jobs at a peach orchard.

The entire family earns a dollar that day and Ma spends it at the ranch

 

67Steinpeck. The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 350-352.

Ibid.. pp. 413-414.

691bid., p. 443.

701 id., p. 478.

68

72

store for hamburger meat, potatoes, bread and coffee.71 The Joads

remain several more days at the peach orchard and they cut down on
food to save money for gas because they realize they're in the midst
of a labor dispute. The meals consist of fried dough and coffee or
cornmeal mush. Winfield's condition deteriorates further from a poor
diet and he gets the "skitters“ from gorging on peaches.72
The Joads' diet was better than the typical meals Steinbeck
described in the series. In good times, for example, a family of
eight would eat: boiled cabbage, baked sweet potatoes, creamed car-
rots, beans, fried dough, jelly and tea. In tough times the same

73 Steinbeck

family would eat dandelion greens and boiled potatoes.
said that the diet consisted mostly of starches and it was impossible
to maintain health.
It will be seen that even in flush times the possibility
of remaining healthy is very slight. The complete absence of
milk for the children is responsible for many of the diseases
of malnutrition. Even pellagra (sic) is far from unknown.74
Chapter V of the series next discussed the problem of child-
birth among migrants. Prospective mothers worked in the fields and
did not have a proper diet. They were uninformed about how to care
for themselves and had to give birth in a dirty bed, perhaps with the

help of a neighbor woman. Because of malnutrition, the mother often

 

7'Ipid.. pp. 510-513.

72
73

74Ibid.

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. pp. 540-542.
Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," Ibid.

73

couldn't produce milk for the baby. Steinbeck described one woman's

childbearing history as an example of the poor childbirth conditions]5

The woman's explanations of why so many of her infants died are the
only direct quotes in the entire series.
In The Grapes of Wrath Rose of Sharon, who is expecting a

76

baby, competes with the sickly Winfield for a drink of milk. She

insists on picking cotton to help the family although she is very

77

weak. She gives birth prematurely lying on a mattress in a boxcar

with the aid of Ma and Mrs. Wainright. The child is born dead.78

Chapter VI of the series covered the migrant scene that
existed before the 1930's. It described the foreign-born migrant
groups that were exploited before the Dust Bowl refugees arrived.

Mention of the foreign workers occurs in an interchapter of The Grapes

 

of Wrath. Chapter 19 of the novel comes just before the Joads arrive
at the Hooverville, and it is a review of California's history until
the arrival of the midwestern migrants.

Now farming became industry, and the owners followed
Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves,
although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese,
Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the
businessmen said. They don't need much. They wouldn't
know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. 79
Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny--deport them.

 

I id.

76Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 453.
77

Ibid., pp. 585-586.

7815id.. pp. 595-503.

79Ibid., p. 315.

74

The seventh and concluding chapter of the series is also
outside of the novel's realm. It tells Steinbeck's concepts of the
solutions to the migrants' problems. His first suggestion was that
permanent communities should be established with homes, schools and
subsistence farms for migrant families so they could have permanent
homes. The men of the family could travel to harvests while the women
worked the gardens, cared for the family, and the children remained in
school. The state, federal and local governments should bear the costs
of establishing and maintaining such communities, he said.80 This
solution sounds like an extension of the government camp system des-
cribed in Chapter IV of the series. I

Second, Steinbeck suggested a state migratory labor board to
make sure that laborers would be distributed around the state only in
the numbers required at harvest time. This would end the rush of
thousands of hopeful souls to farms where only a few hundred jobs
were available. The labor board would negotiate with the migrants'
labor unions, which should be permitted, Steinbeck said.8]

Third, the state attorney general should investigate labor
conditions and vigilante action against the migrants. Vigilante action,
Steinbeck said, was an attempt to overthrow the government because it

82

was an abuse of the law. He named the treatment given to the

migrants "fascistic."

 

80Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," San Francisco News, October
12, 1936, p. 8.

81

0—4
0"

id.

82I

0'

id.

75

And if the terrorism and reduction of human rights, the
floggings, murder by deputies, kidnappings and refusal of
trial by jury are necessary to our economic security, it is
further submitted that California democracy is rapidly dwindling
away. Fascistic methods are more numerous, more powerfully
applied and more openly pragticed in California than any other
place in the United States.

The series concludes with the hope that the migrants will be accepted
into California society and treated fairly.

It will require a militant and watchful organization of
middle-class people, workers, teachers, craftsmen and liberals
to fight this encroaching social philosophy, and to maintain
this state in a democratic form of government.

The new migrants to California from the dust bowl are
here to stay. They are of the best American stock, intelligent,
resourceful; and if given a chance, socially responsible.

To attempt to force them into a peonage of starvation and
intimidated despair will be unsuccessful. They can be citizens
of the highest type, or they can be an army driven by suffering
and hatred to take what they need. On thfiir future treatment
will depend which course they will take.8

 

83

H
0"
—lo
Q

84

0—.
U'
—I

Q

CHAPTER IV

HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON:
STEINBECK'S REPORTING STYLE

Tom Joad got out of the old McAllister Pen,

And there he got his.parole,

After four long years on a man-killin' charge,
Tom Joad come a-walkin down the road, poor boy,
Tom Joad come a-walkin down the road.

Everybody might be just One Big Soul

It looks that-a-way to me,

Everywhere you look in the day or night,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, maw,

That's where I'm a-gonna be.

Whenever little children are hungry and cry,
Whenever people ain't free,

Whenever men are fighting for their rights,
That's where I'm a-gonna be,]maw,

That's where I'm a-gonna be.

The ballad “Tom Joad," by Woodie Guthrie incorporates a theme
central to both John Steinbeck's seven-part newspaper series, "Cali-
fornia's Harvest Gypsies," and his novel The Grapes of Wrath. In the
series this theme takes the form of the discussions of dignity in Chap-
ters II and IV. In the novel it is the theme of integration. The
Joads are scattered at the end of the novel, but integrated into the
human family. Tom sets out to be a leader in the struggle for human

rights. This theme had its start with Steinbeck's own philosophy.

 

1Alan Lomax, comp., hard Hittipg Songs for Hard-Hit People,

notes by Woodie Guthrie, transcribed and ed. Pete Seeger (New York:
Oak Publications, 1967), pp. 236-238.

76

77

His ideas were gleaned from scientific and evolutionary
thought. He had always been a science student. In 1923 he took a
summer course in general zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station in
Pacific Grove, California. There he learned about the organismal con-

2 In the 1930's Steinbeck

cepts of life of William Emerson Ritter.
was reading the works of the evolutionary philosophers Jan Smuts,
Robert Briffault and John Elof Boodin. He and his friend, George
Albee, a novelist, studied the works of biologist W. C. Alee together.3
Steinbeck took scientific and abstract philosophical thought
and made it into an applied theory relevant to social and historical
movements. Steinbeck called it his Phalanx or Group-man theory. The
phalanx is a group of men in action as if all were welded into one
organism. Each man who is a part of the group contributes to the mass
movement. He rejected the idea that history is made by outstanding
individuals who became great leaders. Mass movements occur because
individuals join the phalanx and contribute to its function. Those
who flaunt the phalanx will be destroyed and those who are isolated
from the phalanx will wither. An individual could, however, perform
a leadership function as part of the phalanx.4
This theory of the phalanx is evident in Chapter IV of the

series where Steinbeck defined dignity in terms of the individual's

 

2Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The

Shaging of a Novelist (MinneapOTis: ‘The‘UhiverSity of Minnesota Press,
. PP

31515.. pp 7- 8.
4Ibid.. pp. 32-37.

78

5 In

ability to share the responsibility of participation in society.
the novel The Grapes of Wrath Tom Joad leaves his family to become one
of the leaders of a phalanx. The movement he must join, or face des-
truction, is the organization of labor in its quest for economic and
civil rights. Tom explains to Ma:
Guess who I been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used
to bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can
remember--all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilder-
ness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn't have no soul
that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a
great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his
little piece of a sogl wasn't no good 'less it was with the
rest, an' was whole.

This is another example of how an element from the series was
expanded upon in the novel. It also exemplifies the way in which Stein-
beck's journalistic style differed from straight news reporting. Like
his article for the Nation, Steinbeck's series for the San Francisco
News was structured like an essay. The News series is a lengthy essay
in which Steinbeck presented the problems of California agriculture,
with his comments on them and then proposed solutions to the problems.
Steinbeck's own attitudes toward various groups of people are evident
in the series. The migrants are "resourceful, intelligent, responsible
if given a chance."7 The landowners and authorities are callous,

greedy, willing to violate people's civil rights, and even employ

 

5John Steinbeck, "California's Harvest Gypsies." San Francisco

News, October 8, 1936, p. 16.
6John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: The Viking
Press, 1939), p. 570.

7John Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," October 12, 1936, p. 8.

79

terrorism by hiring vigilantes.8

Steinbeck not only allowed his
biases to show, he stated them clearly so that the reader would know
his position. Clearly, he was a journalist-advocate rather than simply
a reporter of the news.

Another characteristic of Steinbeck's style was his heavy
reliance of general description. Rather than relying on the specific,
the individual, to give his report evidence of authenticity, Steinbeck
generalized as much as possible. He used no individual migrant's name
in the entire series. There is only one direct quote in the whole
series, a woman's comments on her childbearing history in Chapter v.9
Steinbeck might have done this out of a sense of delicacy, a feeling
that he didn't want to expose the pain of a few individuals. Another
reason for his generalizing might have been to give his descriptions
greater impact. Through generalization he implied that the sufferings
described in the series were shared in common among many people.

When Steinbeck described problems such as makeshift housing
or poor diet he gave a few typical examples which might have even been
composites of several different people or families. For example, in
Chapter II of the series Steinbeck described the upper, middle and
lower class living conditions of the migrant camps. In the case of
each family the dwelling place, health and morale of the people were

10

in keeping with one another. These might have been typical families

 

8Ibid.

9John Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," October 9, 1936, p. 14.

10John Steinbeck, "Harvest Gypsies," October 6, 1936, p. 3.

80

or they could have been composites of many families Steinbeck had
seen.

Another striking aspect of the series is that Steinbeck
never mentioned the flood conditions he had been sent to observe.
Steinbeck mentioned in an article written many years later that his
friend, George West, of the San Francisco News, asked him to visit a
group of 3,000 migrants who had been caught in heavy rains in King's
County, California, and were living on high ground in the flooded
fields.n Perhaps Mr. West considered the flood conditions a good
news peg. Steinbeck ignored the flood, perhaps to strengthen the
impact of his more timeless social message.

Although the floods weren't mentioned in the series, they
did play a part in the novel. The rains begin at the end of Chapter
28 of The Grapes of Wrath. During the storm the men struggle to pro-
tect their boxcar dwellings from the flood waters. Their efforts to
build a dam are to no avail and the waters flood out the boxcars and
ruin all their belongings and their cars.12

Steinbeck's newspaper series was at the time considered
effective propaganda on behalf of migrant workers. A group dedicated
to improving the migrants' lot published the series as a pamphlet.

Simon J. Lubin Society, named after California's first Commissioner of

Immigration and Housing, who served in the 1920's, published the

 

11
1960, p. 90.
12

John Steinbeck, "A Primer on the Thirties," sguire, June,

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 588-613.

81

pamphlet under the title, "Their Blood is Strong." Lubin was one of
the first people to be concerned about the welfare of migrant workers.
The members of the society included the Governor of California, Culbert
L. Olson; a columnist for the San Francisco News, John D. Barry; and
Carey McWilliams, an attorney and author. McWilliams served on the
state's Commission of Immigration and Housing for a short time and he
was the author of Factories in the Field, a history of migrant labor

in California which was published about the same time as The Grapes of
hhath, Other Lubin Society members included government officials,
professional people and people in the farming industry.

The thirty-three-page pamphlet containing the series and an
epilogue was published in April, 1938. It went through several print-
ings and demand for it was heavy. The 5-1/2 by 8-1/2 inch pamphlet
had an illustrated cover, and the text was accompanied by photographs
by Dorothea Lange, the only Farm Security Administration photographer
working on the West Coast, whose classic photograph "Migrant Mother"
had illustrated a chapter of Steinbeck's series in the San Francisco
heha.

The introduction was written by John 0. Barry of the heat,
who hailed Steinbeck as a champion of the underprivileged.

His articles had extensive reading. They helped people to
realize the deplorable conditions that existed nearby, in

many instances right under their eyes. It was inevitable

that they should be published together.

Steinbeck is a unique figure. He has come forward at

a time when revolutionary changes are going on in the world.

,He will be a factor in those changes and a significant factor
too. His sympathies are, not with the special people, but

82
with those at a disadvantage, igrely in need of a gifted
and valiant literary champion.

Steinbeck's epilogue, dated Spring, 1938, was a cry of out-
rage against the continuance of conditions he had first reported on
more than a year and a half before. He cited the efforts of relief
authorities and public health nurses to help the migrants, but said
their aid made little impact upon their problems. In the epilogue
Steinbeck recapitulated the description of migrant life he had given
in more detail in the series. He said that he had just returned from
a field trip to migrant camps the week before he wrote the epilogue,
and he had more stories to tell of starving people, dying children and
stunned disbelief at the conditions people were facing. The epilogue
ends with an emotional and vigorous cry for action on behalf of the
migrants. It took the same tone as his ending for the series and the
conclusion of his article "Dubious Battle in California."

Next year the hunger will come again and the year after

that and so on until we come out of this coma and realize

that our agriculture for all of its great produce is a failure.
If you buy a farm horse and only feed him when you work him,
the horse will die. No one complains at the necessity of
feeding the horse when he is not working. But we complain
about feeding the men and women who work our lands. Is it
possible that this state is so stupid so vicious and so greedy
that it cannot feed and clothe the men and women who help to
make it the richest area in the world? Must the hungeh4become
anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?

It was very unusual for a California newspaper of the 1930's

to publish material that was obviously favorable to the migrant

 

13John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Stron (San Francisco:
Simon J. Lubin Society of Caliiornia, Inc., l938i, n.p.

14Ibid.. p. 33.

83

workers. Dorothea Lange, the Resettlement Administration photographer
who was working in California, deserves the credit for getting such
material into the San Francisco News. About seven months before Stein-
beck's series appeared in the heat, Miss Lange.was returning from a
month-long field trip. As she passed a flooded pea pickers' camp in
Nipomo she noticed a mother and her children. She considered going
on to San Francisco, but she turned around and went back to take the
picture. The mother and her children were the subjects of "Migrant
Mother," the photograph which illustrates the first chapter of Stein-
beck's series.15
Miss Lange developed her photographs and rushed them straight
to the offices of the San Francisco News. The editor of the heh§_noti-
fied the United Press about the camp in Nipomo, and the United Press
contacted relief authorities. A United Press report in the NEEE.
March 10, 1936 issue described the pea pickers' joy at hearing ship-

ments of food would be arriving from Los Angeles.16

The story was
illustrated with two of Miss Lange's photographs of the mother and her
children. The heh§_gave Miss Lange credit for alerting the public and
the authorities about the migrants' desperate condition.

Ragged, ill, emaciated by hunger, 2,500 men, women and children

are rescued after weeks at suffering by the chance visit of a
Government photographer.

 

15Dorothea Lange, "The Assignment I'll Never Forget," Ameri-
can West, May, l970, pp. 46-47.

16Paul S. Taylor, "Migrant Mother: 1936," American West,
May, 1970’ pp. 42-430

'7Ipid.. p. 42.

 

Miss
both
doing
9j_hI

Lange

lathe
News;
E535!
Hear:
d1591
aIIllg

H96 I":

84

March, 1935 was not the first time Miss Lange had had contact with the
San Francisco News, according to her husband, Paul S. Taylor, who
worked for the Resettlement Administration in the 1930's, and is now
a professor emeritus of economics of the University of California.
He recalls:
The San Francisco News was well familiar with Dorothea Lange's
photographs. In the summer of 1935 we showed our project book
proposing a program of camp construction, and very soon a lead
editorial appeared in the News in support, written doubtless
by the Associate Editor, George P. West, to whom we had shown
it. From time to time the News carried Dorothea Lange's photo-
graphs, as did newspapers all over the country. 8
Miss Lange and John Steinbeck did not meet in the mid-1930's although
both had a common interest in the migrants' problems and both were
doing field work at about the same time. They did meet after The Grapes
of Wrath was published in April, 1939 and prior to the publication of
Lange and Taylor's book, An American Exodus.19
The San Francisco News may have had editors who were sym-
pathetic to the migrants and their problems, but another San Francisco
newspaper did not. William Randolph Hearst and his San Francisco
Examiner spoke out against any clamor for reform in agriculture. If
Hearst had read The Grapes of Wrath he might have noticed the mildly
disguised description of himself which Steinbeck put into the mouth of
a migrant. He tells Casy and the Joads about a man who could have been

Hearst as an example of the extreme greed of the California landowners.

 

18

19Ibid.

Letter, Paul S. Taylor to Frances Miller, August II, 1974.

The
acr

wor
gua
bul
wi
he'
ac

Se

 

 

_g. «‘4ng

 

t
S
1

lime , H

85

They' s a fella, newspaper fella near the coast, got a million
acres--“

Casy looked up quickly, "Million acres? What in the
worl' can he do with a million acres?"

"I dunno. He jus' got it. Runs a few cattle. Got
guards ever'place to keep folks out. Rides aroun' in a
bullet-proof car. I seen pitchers of him. Fat, sof' fella
with little mean eyes an' a mouth like a ass-hole. Scairt
he's gonna die. Got a million acres an' scairt of dyin'."

Casy demanded, "What in hell can he do with a million
acres? What's he want a million acres for?"

. . "I dunno," he said. "Guess he's crazy. Mus' be crazy.
Seen a pitcher of him. He looks crazy. Crazy an' mean."

. .The preacher smiled, and he looked puzzled. He splashed
a floating water bug away with his hand. “If he needs a
million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it
'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, there ain't no
million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's dis-
appointed that nothin' he can do'll make him feel rich--not
Etch lake Mis' Wilson was when she give her tent when Grampa

e .

The San Francisco Examiner denounced The Grapes of Wrath and Carey
McWilliams' Factories in the Field with a story whose headline read,

21

"Reds Blamed for Books on Migrant Labor." Since Factories in the

fiela_contained information which substantiated The Grapes of Wrath,

 

groups like the Associated Farmers assumed that Steinbeck and McWilliams
were united in a Communist conspiracy. McWilliams said:

I think I have cited enough evidence--there is much more--
to confirm the discovery by the Associated Farmers of a con-
spiracy by two authors to subvert California agriculture. But
there is, I regret to report, one thing wrong with ths con-
spiracy theory: namely, I never met John Steinbeck.

 

20John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. pp. 281-282.

21Carey McWilliams, "John Steinbeck: A Man, a Place and a
Time," American West, May, 1970, p. 39.

22Ibid.

86

The reactions to both the news series and The Grapes of Wrath
were so vehement because the two works were authentic portrayals of
California agriculture. John Steinbeck's journalistic style was not
orthodox. He wrote the impassioned essays of an advocate, not the
dispassionate reports of an objective reporter. One of the reasons
he attempted reporting was his great desire to see his subjects' suf-
fering alleviated.

His journalism was clearly a precursor of his novel Ihe_
Grapes of Wrath. Facts, settings, themes and even phrases from the
news reports appear in the novel. This indicates that the novel is
based heavily on his work as a reporter. He made many field trips
besides the one for the San Francisco News and got to know his subject
well by living with it. He also tried to understand the larger trends
behind the scenes he observed by going to the Resettlement Administra-
tion for background information.

The Grapes of Wrath is indeed a work of literature, but it
could not have been written solely from the imagination. It is a work
of literature which documents a period of American history. This was
probably part of Steinbeck's purpose in writing the book, to inform

people and to move them to action.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck, John. Cup of Gold. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co.,

1929.
Steinbeck's first novel was the only one of his early works not set in
his native California and the only one not based on California people
and places.

In Dubious Battle. New York: Covici-Friede, 1936.
This precursor of The Grapes of Wrath which described the strike of
migrant workers in an orchard valley, was based on Steinbeck's field-
work and research. It employed reportorial skills.

. The Forgotten Village. New York: The Viking Press, 1941.

Originally the text for a documentary film, Steinbeck wrote it at the
site of the film, a rural village in Mexico.

The Grapes of Wrath. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.
Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the struggles of a
migrant family to reach California in the 1930's, and then to find work
and survive.

. hagfrom the Sea of Cortez. New York: The Viking Press,
1 5 .
Observations about a scientific expedition taken with biologist Edward
Ricketts, contains passages about Steinbeck's personal philosophy of
life.
The Long Valley. New York: The Viking Press, 1938.

Collection of short stories includes The Red Pony which expresses some
of Steinbeck's philosophical ideas.

Of Mice and Men. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937.

Steinbeck's successful novel and play has a California setting and is
one of his experiments with dramatic form.

87

88
The Pastures of Heaven. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam,
1932‘.

This book illustrates how Steinbeck used familiar California characters
and settings to create fictional works.

The Red Pony. New York: Covici-Friede, I937.

, and Edward F. Ricketts. Sea of Cortez. New York: The Viking
Press, 1941.

This account of a scientific expedition made with biologist Edward
Ricketts shows Steinbeck's strong interest in science.

. Their Blood is Stropg, San Francisco: The Simon J. Lubin
Society OiicalifOrnia, Inc., 1938.

This pamphlet includes Steinbeck's series for the San Francisco News
plus an epilogue. It was pro-migrant propaganda for a society thCh
aided migrant workers.

To a God Unknown. New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933.
An early Steinbeck novel which shows his use of a California setting,
the Big Sur country, where Steinbeck himself had lived and worked.

Articles by John Steinbeck

 

Steinbeck, John. "Always Something to Do in Salinas." Holiday, June,
1955, pp. 58, 156.

. "Autobiography: The Making of a New Yorker." New York
Times, February 1, 1953, Section IV, Part II, pp. 26-27,

. "Critics--From a Writer's Viewpoint." Saturday Review,
August 27, 1955, pp. 20-28.

. "California's Harvest Gypsies." San Francisco News, Octo-
ber 5-12, 1936.

. "Dubious Battle in California." Nation, September I3, 1936,
pp. 302-304.

. p"Nggel Prize Acceptance Speech." Vogue, March l, 1963,

. "The Novel Might Benefit by the Discipline, the Terseness."
Stage, 15 (January, 1938), 50-51.

89

"A Primer on the Thirties." Esguire, June, 1960, pp. 85-93.
. "The Way it Seems to John Steinbeck." Occident (Fall,
1936), 5.
Letters by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck, Elaine, and Wallsten, Robert, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in
Letters. New York: The Viking Press, 1975.

University of California. The Bancroft Library. Papers of George S.
Albee, Fifty-one letters during l930-l950.

University of California. The Bancroft Library. Papers of Joseph
Henry Jackson, Thirty-five letters during 1936-1948.

Harvard University. The Houghton Library. Letters to Lawrence Clark
Powell, October, 1936-April, 1939.
Unpublished Letters, Interview

Letter from Richard Albee to Frances Miller, August I, 1974.
Letter from Pare Lorentz to Frances Miller, August 5, I974.
Letter from Carey McWilliams to Frances Miller, June 23, 1974.
Letter from Paul S. Taylor to Frances Miller, August II, 1974.

Letter from Phyllis S. Wilson (daughter of Roy Stryker) to Frances
Miller, September 4, 1974.

Interview with Elizabeth Otis, New York City, July 3, I974.

Steinbeck Biography

Books

 

Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping_
9f a Novelist. Minneapolis: TheUniversity of Minnesota
Press, 1973.

 

O'Connor, Richard. John Steinbeck. New York: McGraw Hill, 1970.

90
Newspaper Articles

"La Follette Committee Investigation Based on The Grapes of Wrath. "
Time, August 21,1939,p.10.

"Of Mice and Men (Play) Receives Critics' Award. " Time, April 25,
1938, p. 39.

"Of Mice and Men (Play): Steinbeck Interviewed." New York Times,
December 5, 1937, p. 7.

 

"Of Mice and Men (Play) Wins N. Y. Drama Critics Circle Award. " hey.
York Times, April 19,1938.

"Original Typescript of Book, The Grapes of Wrath, Given to The Library
of Congress." New York Times, December 25, 1941, p. 31.

"Portrait of John Steinbeck." New York Times, April 19, 1938, p. 23.

"Pulitzer Prize is Awarded to 'The Grapes of Wrath'." New York Times,
May 7, 1940, p. l.

 

"Pulitzer Prize Recipient." Time, May 13, 1940, p. 77.
"Steinbeck Inflation." Time, October 11, 1937, p. 79.

"The Viking Press to Publish his Books." New York Times, August 16,
1938.

Whitman, Alden. "John Steinbeck Dies Here at 66." New York Times,
December 21, 1968, pp. 1, 31.

 

"Wife Gets Divorce." New York Times, March 13, 1942, p. 12.
Articles

Abramson, Ben. "John Steinbeck. " Reading and Collecting, I (December,
1936), 4-5,18.
"Authors and Others." Publisher's Weekly, CXXVII (July 27, 1935), 223.

Baker, Carlos. "Steinbeck of California." Delphian Quarterly, XXIII
(April, 1940), 40-45.

Bidwell, Martin. "John Steinbeck: An Impression." Prairie Schooner,
XII (Spring, 1938), lO-15.

91

"Biographical Sketch." Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, XI (March,
1937), 456.

Block, Maxine, ed. “John Steinbeck." Current Biography. New York:
H. W. Wilson, 1940, pp. 757-759}

Covici, Pascal, ed. "Introduction." The Portable Steinbeck. New York:
The Viking Press, 1946.

Gannett, Lewis. "Introduction." The Portable Steinbeck. Ed. by Pas-
cal Covici. New York: e 1 ing ress,

Gannett, Lewis. John Steinbeck: Personal and Biographical Notes.
New York: The Viking Press, l939.

Jackson, Joseph Henry. "Steinbeck." Introduction to Of Mice and Men.
New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1937.

Jackson, Joseph Henry. Whfi Steinbeck Wrote The Grapes of Wrath. New
York: Limited E t ons C u , .

Powell, Lawrence Clark. "The Birth of Steinbeck.“ Wilson Library
Bulletin, XIII (April, 1939), 540.

 

 

"Pulitzer hggtgon Awards." Saturday Review of Literature, XXII (May 11,
O , 5f.

l930's History

Books
Agee, James. The Collected Short Prose of James A ee. Edited by Robert
Fitzgerald} TBoston: ‘HoughtonMiTTlin 0., 1968.

, and Evans, Walker. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965.

Caldwell, Erskine. Call It Ex erience: The Years of Learnin How to
- Write. New VorE: Duell Sloan and Pearce, I951.

Caldwell, Erskine, and Bourke-White, Margaret. You Have Seen Their
Faces. New York: The Viking Press, 1

Johnson, Vance. Heaven's Tableland: The Dust Bowl Story. New York:
Farrar Straus, 19472

Lange, Dorothea, and Taylor, Paul S. An American Exodus. New York:
Reynal and Hitchcock, I940.

92
Kirkland, Jack. Tobacco Road: A Three Act Play, New York: Duell
Sloan andTPearce,*Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1952.
Lomax, Alan, comp. Hard Hittin Son s for Hard-Hit Peo 1e. Notes by
Woodie Guthrie, transcrihed anded. by Pete eeger. New
York: Oak Publications, 1967.
Lorentz, Pare. The River. New York: Stackpole Sons, 1938.

McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Mi rator Farm
Labor in Caliiornia. Boston: TLittle, Brown and Co., 1939.

. Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migrator Labor in the
United States. *Boston: Little, Brown and’ 0., 1942.

Related Books

Baldwin, Stanley. Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the
Farm Security Administration. Chapel Hill: TheUniversity
pT’North CarolinaPress,l§68.

Hurley, F. Jack. Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development
of Documentar Photo ra h Tih'the Thirties. *Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1972.

Snyder, Robert L. Pare Lorentz and the Documentar Film. Norman:
University 07 Oklahoma Press, l968.

Articles

 

Davenport, Walter. "Land Where Our Children Die." Collier's, Septem-
ber 18, 1937.

"I Wonder Where We Can Go Now?" Fortune, April, 1939, pp. 90-94, 112-
119.

Kneeland, Douglas. "West Coast 'Okies' Recall Depression, Scoff at
Recession." New York Times, February 22, 1975, pp. 29, 32.

Lange, Dorothea. "An Assignment I'll Never Forget." American West,
' VII (May, 1970). 46-47.

"Lean Time Ahead for Migrants." San Francisco News, May 23-25, 1938.

McWilliams, Carey. "John Steinbeck: A Man, a Place and a Time."
American West, VII (May, 1970), 4-8, 38-40, 62-63.

93

Mehlmann, Michael. "Hero of the 30's--The Tenant Farmer." Heroes of
P0 ular Culture. Edited by Ray 8. Browne, Marshall Fishfiick,
Michael T. Marsden. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green
University Popular Press, 1972.

"Nomads oflthe California Farms." San Francisco News, February 4-19,
38.

Penny, Lucretia. [Dorothea Lange.) "Pea Picker's Child." Survey
Graphic, July, 1935, pp. 352-353.

"Speaking of Pictures. . . . These by Life Prove Facts in Grapes of
Wrath.“ Life, February 5, 1940, pp. lO-ll.

Taylor, Paul 5. "Again the Covered Wagon." Survey Graphic, July,
1935, pp. 348-351, 368.

. "From the Ground Up." Survey Graphic, September, 1936, pp.
526-529, 537-538.

. "Migrant Mother: 1936." American West, VII (May, 1970),
41 -45.

"Migratory Farm Labor in the United States." Monthlnyabor
Review, March, 1937.

Pamphlets

Farmers Without Land. Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 12, 1937.

Farm Labor Organizing 1905-1967: A Brief History. National Advisory
Comm ttee on arm a or, . t., New York, New York

10003, July, 1967.

 

Taylor, Paul S. Adrift on the Land. Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 42,
1940.

Reactions to The Grapes of Wrath

Bennett, Robert. The Wrath of John Steinbeck or St. John Goes to
Church. Los Angelés: Albertson Press, 1939.

 

Hartrangt, Marshall V. Grapes of Gladness. Los Angeles: De Vorss &
Co., 1939.

Miron, George Thomas. The Truth About John Steinbeck and the Migrants.
Los Angeles: Haynes Corp.,l939.

94

Shockley, Martin S. "The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma."
American Literature, XV (1944), 351-361.

Congressional Hearings_

U.S. Congress. House. Report of the §elect Committee to Investigate
the'InterstateMigration 0fTDestitute Citizens. CumulatiVe
Index of Cppgress ona ommitteeFHeafihgs of the 74th to the
85th Congress. Washington, 9.C.: TGovernment Printing Office,

U.S. Congress. Senate. Education and Labor Committee. Hearjpgs on
yjpjations of Free S eech and Assembl and Infractions of the
Rights of Lapar. arts 46-75, Washington, D.C.: Government

Pr nt ng ce, 1939-1940.

 

 

 

Literary and Film Histories
Barsam, Richard Meran. Nonfiction Film. A Critical History. New
York: E. P. Dutton E Co., Inc., 1973.

Jacobs, Lewis, ed. The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Wood-
stock. NefiTYork: Hopkinson and Blake, Poplishers, 1971.

Richardson, Robert. Literature and Film. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1969.

Weber, Ronald, ed. The Reporter as Artist: A Look at_the New Journal-
ism Controverey. 7New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1974.

Wolfe, Tom. The New Journalism. New York: Harper 8 Row, Publishers,
1973.
Critical Books
Davis, Robert Murray, comp. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliiis,N}JZ: Prentice-Hall,l972.

Donohue, Agnes. A Casebook on The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Crowell,
1968.

Fontenrose, Joseph Eddy. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Inter-
pretation. New iorh: Barnes Ginble,TInc., 1963.

95

French, Warren, ed. A Com anion to The Grapes of Wrath. New York:
The Viking Press, 1963

French, Warren. John Steinbeck. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961.

Lisca, Peter. "The Art of John Steinbeck: An Analysis of Its Develop-
ment." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wis-
consin, 1955.

The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, I958.

Marks, Lester Jay. Thematic Desi n in the Novels of John Steinbeck.
The Hague: leuton, 19 . .

Moore, Harry Thornton. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Criti-
cal Study. Chicago: Normandie House, 1%

Tedlock, E. W., Jr., and Wicker, L. C., eds. Steinbeck and His Critics.
Albuquerque: University of New MexicolPress,

 

Watt, Frank William. John Steinbeck. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962.
Bibljpgraphy,

Hayashi, Tetsumaro. Steinbeck: A Concise Bibliography l930-l965.
Metuchen, N.Jf: Scarecrow7Press, 1967.

Critical Articles
Baker, Carlos. "In Dubious Battle Resolved." New York Times Book

Review, July 25, 1943, pp. 4, 16.

Beach, Joseph Warren. "Art & Propaganda." American Fiction: 1920-
1940. New York: Russell & Russell, 1960.

Blankenship, Russell. "John Steinbeck and The Sociological Novel."
American Literatpre as an Expression of the National Mind.
New York: *Holt, Rinehart E Winston, 1958.

Blotner, Joseph L. "John Steinbeck: The Party Organizer." The Politi-
cal Novel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955.

Bracher, Frederick. "Steinbeck and the 81010 ical View of Man." :[he
Pacific Speetator, 11 (Winter, 1948 , 14-29.

96

Cannon, Gerard. "The Pauline Apostleship of Tom Joad." College
English, XXIV (1962), 222-224.

Carlson, Eric W. "Symbolism in The Grapes of Wrath." Colle e English,
XIX (1958), 172-175. PéL7

 

Carpenter, Frederick I. "The Philosophical Joads." College English,
II (1941), 315-325.

 

Crockett, H. Kelly. "The Bible and the Grapes of Wrath." College
English, XXIV (1962), 193-199.

French, Warren. "Another Look at The Grapes of Wrath." Colorado
Quarterly, III (1955), 337-343.

Frohock, William M. “John Steinbeck: The Utility of Wrath." 115a
Novel of Violence in America. Dallas, Texas: Southern
Methpdist UhiVerSity Press, 1950.

Griffin, Robert J., and Freedman, William A. "Machines and Animals:
Pervasive Motifs in The Grapes of Wrath.“ Journal of English
and Germanic Philology, LXII (1963), 569-580}

Gurko, Leo. "Steinbeck." Heroes Hi hbrows and the Popular Mind. New
York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953

Hoffman, Frederick J. "Violence and Rhetoric in the l930s." the.
Modern Novel in America. Chicago: Regney, 1951.

Hunter, J. P. "Steinbeck's Wine of Affirmation in The Grapes of Wrath."
Essays in Modern American Literature. 31 (1963), 76-89.

Jones, Claude E. "Proletarian Writing and John Steinbeck." Sewanee
Review, XLVIII (1940), 445-456.

Madison, Charles A. "Covici: Steinbeck's Editor, Collaborator and
Conscience." Saturday Review, XLIV (June 25, 1966), 15-16.

. "The Friendship of Covici and Steinbeck." Chicago Jewish
Forum, XXIV (1966), 293-296.

Nevius, Blake. "Steinbeck: One Aspect." Pacific Spectator, III
(1949), 302-310.

Nichols, Lewis. "Talk With John Steinbeck.“ New York Times Book
Review, September 28, 1952, p. 30.

Pollack, Theodore. "On the Ending of The Grapes of Wrath." Modern
Fiction Studies, IV (1958), 177-178.

97

Ross, Woodburn. "John Steinbeck: Naturalism's Priest." College Eng-
lish, X (1949), 432-437.

Rideout, Walter S. "Steinbeck." The Radical Novel in the United
States: 1900-1954. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard”UHTVersity
Press, 1956.

 

Shockley, Martin. "Christian Symbolism in The Grapes of Wrath." gal;
lege Epglish, XVIII (1956), 87-90.

Slade, Leonard A., Jr. "Use of Biblical Allusions in Grapes of Wrath."
College Lahguage Association Journal, II (1968), 241-247.

Taylor, Walter Fuller. "The Grapes of Wrath Reconsidered." Mississippi
Quarterly, XII (1959), 136-144.

Weeks, Donald. "Steinbeck Against Steinbeck." Pacific Spectator, I
(1947), 447-457.

Wilson, Edmund. "Steinbeck." Classics and Commercials, A Literahy
History of the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950.

Wright, Celeste. "Ancient Analo ues of an Incident in John Steinbeck."
Western Folklore, XIV i1955), 50-51.

MICHIGAN STATE UNIV. LIBRARIES

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