Editor's Note: This story was originally published in This Land, Vol. 5, Issue 8, on April 15, 2014.
Part of the work put in by John Steinbeck in preparation for writing The Grapes of Wrath was a series of articles published in the San Francisco News in October 1936. He called it The Harvest Gypsies, and in it he described the exodus of poor farm people from the Dust Bowl areas into California, where they filled key positions of seasonal labor in the agricultural economy.
For decades prior, those positions had been filled by importations of foreigners—from China, Japan, and the Philippines. Those foreign workers, “drawn from a peon class,” as Steinbeck crudely but accurately puts it, were gravely mistreated. That should not have been possible with the Dust Bowl refugees. “It should be understood,” Steinbeck argues, “that with this new race the old methods of repression, of starvation wages, of jailing, beating and intimidation are not going to work; these are American people.”
Steinbeck was writing hopefully rather than accurately. The Harvest Gypsies is filled with just as much ruthlessness and predacity as its fictional cousin, The Grapes of Wrath. You see in Gypsies the same strikebreakers, the same heartless big-time growers. There’s that federal camp where the Joads lived briefly, in a kind of semi-socialist workers’ commune. There are jalopies on the highway, piled up Clampett-wise with families and their meager belongings.
There are stories of unshakeable tragedy. Children dying in squatters’ camps because there isn’t enough food, enough milk.
One family loses a child, and “[t]he father and mother now feel that paralyzed dullness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain.” Grief makes the father a poor laborer: “He is no longer alert; he isn’t quick at piece-work, and he is not able to fight clear of the dullness that has settled on him.” This grief is a kind of deadliness. If the man can’t stay alert in the picking fields, he will fall behind, lose position, forfeit what little pay he’s able to earn. That will mean less food for his surviving children, and so the death of one child hastens the deaths of the others.
People who suffer like this fall easily, even naturally, into rage, into wrath. “Those to whom evil is done,” writes Auden, “Do evil in return.” The kind of deadliness suffered by those migrants is uncontainable and spreads. Steinbeck writes, “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.
“We regard this destruction of dignity, 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 outcast who will strike at our Government in any way that occurs to him.”