WORKING ROAD

A pea picker uses his vehicle as a makeshift home in February 1936 off Highway 101 at Nipomo. Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress.

U.S. 101 wasn’t the conveyor belt for migrant labor that 66 and 99 were, but that doesn’t diminish its role as an artery for farmworkers who plied their trade on either side of the asphalt. In places like the Salinas Valley, known as “America’s Salad Bowl,” and the Nipomo Mesa farther south, laborers still work harvesting crops like lettuce, tomatoes, spinach, and strawberries.

Take a detour from the modern freeway up the old alignment of 101 known as Cattlemen Road between San Ardo and San Lucas, and you might notice an abandoned farm labor camp toward the northern end of this now lightly traveled road. There’s a chain-link fence around it now, but peer beyond it, and you’ll see a collection of one- and two-room wooden structures with peeling red paint, no glass in the windows, and woodstove chimneys.

I asked the owners of the property how long it had been there, but they couldn’t tell me. From the look of it, it had been abandoned for years.

Travel north on the highway toward Chualar, and you’ll reach a placed called the Bracero Memorial Highway, site of what the highway patrol described at the time as “the biggest single fatal vehicle accident of any kind in the history of California.” The National Safety Council said it was the worst bus-train accident in U.S. history.

An abandoned migrant camp sits along Cattlemen Road (old U.S. 101) in the Salinas Valley, south of San Lucas.

The collision in September 1963 took the lives of 32 celery pickers aboard the bus, which was carrying them home to a Salinas-area labor camp following a day in the fields. It was coming up on 4:30 in the afternoon, and the workers’ day had concluded just less than 10 minutes earlier. The man behind the wheel, Francisco Espinoza, was driving toward 101 along a private road owned by Merrill Farms when he came to an unguarded railroad crossing.

He stopped.

But when he looked right to check the tracks, all he could see was the man in the passenger seat: the foreman, Arturo Galindo, who was busy filling out timecards.

Meanwhile, a Southern Pacific freight train hauling 71 open-top cars of sugar beets was barreling northward at 65 mph. It had left Gonzales at 4:15 p.m., and engineer Robert E. Cripe sounded his whistle as the bus came into view. He didn’t reduce speed, though, seeing that the driver had what appeared to be a clear view of the tracks. Surely, he would see the train coming.

But he didn’t.

And when Espinoza pulled the bus out onto the tracks, there was no way the engineer could stop in time.

“Bodies just flew all over the place,” said Tony Vasquez, 29, who saw the accident from a lettuce field near the crossing. “Two of the men died in my arms.”

The train continued for a full mile before Cripe could bring it to a stop.

“The entire front of the northbound locomotive was covered in sheet metal,” said Bob McVay, a local radio station owner who arrived just as the first of 15 ambulances got there. “The metal formerly was the side of the bus.”

Bits of clothing, Mexican straw hats and shoes, were embedded in the metal.

“One body was hooked under the engine,” Monterey Coroner Christopher Hill Jr. said. “Shoes, hats and cutting knives were all around. Everywhere, you could hear the injured moaning.”

Twenty-two occupants of the shattered bus died right there by the rail lines; the rest perished after being rushed by ambulance to Salinas hospitals. Bodies and clothes were so badly tangled in the wreckage that the coroner had a hard time identifying any of them in the crash’s immediate aftermath.

“We found some passports in the wreckage, but I couldn’t in good conscience say we’ve made any positive identification,” he said. “The clothing was all mixed up. It was a hodgepodge, and you can’t tell much from the faces.”

Espinoza, the only man not hurt, was charged with manslaughter but later acquitted.

At the time, farm labor camps in California housed an estimated 49,000 migrants toiling for wages of $1 to $2.50 an hour.

“They don’t fit the picture of the lazy Mexican sitting in a village with a hat on his head,” said John Murray of the Federal Bureau of Employment Security. “They’re dedicated and willing to work.”

But far too many died in accidents similar to the one that claimed those 32 lives near Chualar. According to Don Miller’s book They Saved the Crops, more than 1,200 farm transportation crashes claimed 169 lives in 1962 and 1963 alone. The year after the Chualar accident, the bracero program was discontinued.

An itinerant worker walks along U.S. 101 near San Luis Obispo in 1939. Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, public domain.

LETTUCE STRIKE

It was far from the first time farm laborers had encountered hardship in the Salinas Valley.

Not long before he completed perhaps his best-known work, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck took aim at the Salinas lettuce industry—and its treatment of farmworkers—in a book titled L’Affaire Lettuceburg.

Although a work of fiction, it was based on a real event: the Salinas lettuce strike of 1936. And it hit close to home. Steinbeck was born in Salinas, and his experiences there helped shape his outlook, despite what might be described as an acerbity toward the town.

“Salinas was never a pretty town,” he wrote in the 1955 piece for Holiday magazine. “It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley, cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful, but Salinas was not and we knew it.”

Whatever Steinbeck’s bias against his hometown, there was no denying that it got really ugly in September of 1936, when the events that inspired L’Affaire Lettuceburg took place.

Tensions between growers and packing shed workers in Salinas had grown during the summer of that year, with the Fruit and Vegetable Workers’ Union demanding that growers give preference in hiring to union members.

The growers refused.

Instead, they offered to meet the union’s demand for a raise of five cents an hour, while making minor concessions to the union’s demands concerning working periods, holiday schedules, and shed conveniences.

The union balked.

On September 5, 3,500 lettuce trimmers and packers in the Salinas-Watsonville area walked off the job and set up picket lines around 70 packing sheds in the area. The growers called it a strike; the union said it was a lockout. Whatever it was, while it proceeded peacefully at first, losses to the $10 million industry began to mount at a rate of $75,000 a day, and box makers made matters worse by joining the walkout.

The growers couldn’t continue to absorb those losses for long, but they weren’t about to capitulate to union demands for a closed shop, either.

As the pressure built on both sides, State Highway Patrol Chief E. Raymond Cato sent officers with radio cars to Salinas to keep U.S. 101 open in the strike area.

“We are not interested in the strike,” he declared, “but there have been numerous instances of motorists being stopped to determine if they were strikebreakers, and one farmer, driving one truck was assaulted. We continue to keep the highway open and assure the free movement of traffic. If more men are needed to do this, they will be sent to Salinas. We have no other interest in the situation.”

Whether that statement was true or not, the highway patrol would soon find itself in the thick of one of the nastiest strike conflicts of the era.

On September 12, the sheriffs swore in 20 special deputies to build a barbed-wire barricade around the Salinas Ice Company. One report called them deputies; another referred to them as “vigilante cowboys dressed in wild west regalia and armed with guns and lariats.” Eighteen policemen and some of those highway patrol officers stood watch nearby as they went about their business. They’d be doing more than watching soon enough.

Women joined the picket line and jeered as non-union workers were brought in to work the packing sheds.

“We are going to pack lettuce and we are going to do it soon,” declared Charles Brooks, secretary of the grower-shipper association, responding to fears that nearly 1,000 carloads of lettuce would mature in the week ahead and go to waste if it weren’t promptly harvested. By this time, about 50 state highway patrol officers were in the area.

The union wasn’t about to be intimidated, even if the hastily deputized cowboy vigilantes were prowling around like they wanted blood.

Two decades later, in an article for Holiday magazine titled “Always Something to Do in Salinas,” Steinbeck would recall these vigilantes being under the direction of a “general” who was orchestrating their response to the pickets. This general, he wrote, “installed direct telephone lines to various stations, even had one group of telephones that were not connected to anything. He set armed guards over his suite and he put Salinas in a state of siege. He organized Vigilantes. Service-station operators, owners of small stores, clerks, bank tellers got out sporting rifles, shotguns, all the hundreds of weapons owned by small-town Americans who in the West at least, I guess, are the most heavily armed people in the world.… In addition to the riflemen, squads drilled in the streets with baseball bats. 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.”

Hauling a trailer along U.S. 101 near King City in 1936. Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, public domain.

A group of longshoremen, he said, were marching toward Salinas to join the strike, along a route marked by red flags—the color of communism. It later turned out that the flags weren’t communist banners at all, but merely survey flags that had been put out by the Department of Highways. Nonetheless, Steinbeck said, the “general” had them removed and burned on Main Street for everyone to see.

The lines were squarely drawn. On the one side, Joseph Casey of the American Federation of Labor called for a national boycott on lettuce handled by the non-union workers during the strike. “Everyone is on the side of property rights and privileges,” he proclaimed. “The poor devils who work in the field have no rights at all.”

On the other side, Gov. Frank Merriam said he had irrefutable evidence that the strike organizers were, in fact, communists seeking to subvert the lettuce trade.

On September 15, the powder keg finally blew.

As the growers brought strikebreakers in, state highway patrol officers armed with rifles lined the roadway, warning strikers that unless they cleared a lane to the plant, they would open fire with machine guns. The growers tried to ship out truckloads of lettuce but the protesters blocked their path, cutting the ropes on one of the trucks and dumping the lettuce into the street.

It wasn’t long before officers were unleashing a barrage of tear gas and “dysentery gas” over a six-block area, all the way from the business district to the packinghouses. The onslaught was so severe and the gas so pervasive that children playing in yards near the demonstration were overcome, and some of them had to be treated by physicians.

The workers responded by stoning trucks and attacking strikebreakers with rocks and hot pepper. Some accounts reported hand-to-hand conflict between strikers and authorities in the street.

The situation became so bad that sporting goods stores put padlocks on their firearms and ammunition sales areas for fear that the crowd would break in and seize their weapons.

“It looks like war to me,” Chief Cato said, as Sheriff Carl Abbott rode through the streets and broadcast a call via loudspeaker for all able-bodied citizens to help bring order to the chaos. Within an hour, 400 to 500 men arrived at the county jail to volunteer. The police chief brought in uniformed reinforcements from San Jose and San Luis Obispo, while sending an urgent message to San Francisco for more tear gas bombs.

In the end, the growers and their allies triumphed. The strike was broken, and the incident gradually faded from the memories of many in the region.

But not from Steinbeck’s.

Long before he wrote his biting account of “the general” waging his Battle of Salinas against the striking lettuce workers, he completed an entire book on the subject: the aforementioned L’Affaire Lettuceburg.

His publisher was all set to print it up when he received a letter from Steinbeck telling him to scrap it.

“This is going to be a hard letter to write,” Steinbeck wrote. “This book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! these incidents all happened but —I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire.”

Of course, he was wrong about that. The incident continued to gnaw at him, and reasserted itself in print when he wrote “Always Something to Do in Salinas.” And even as he put aside the manuscript to L’Affaire Lettuceburg, Steinbeck didn’t give up on writing about the plight of American farm laborers: The very next year, he produced The Grapes of Wrath.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND THE MIGRANT

If Steinbeck helped define the Great Depression with his writing, Dorothea Lange did the same with her photos. And like Steinbeck, Lange’s work was closely tied to the ribbon of road known as U.S. 101.

Born in 1895, Lange endured her share of hardship as a child growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey. A bout of polio in 1902 left her right leg weakened, and she walked with a limp for the rest of her life.

“I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me,” she would say. “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me—all those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”

The scars weren’t only physical: Throughout the rest of her childhood, her classmates teased her and called her “limpy.” Then, five years after her illness, Lange’s father left; he never attempted to contact her again.

After graduating from high school, Lange set herself on the course that would forge her reputation, working with Arnold Genthe, who was known for his photos of the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco. And it was San Francisco that became her destination when she decided to move west in 1918 after taking just a single photography class at Columbia University. She had just $140 to her name when she made the trip, but her determination and natural eye soon paid off: She found a job as a department store photofinisher and, within a year, had left to open her own portrait studio.

Dorothea Lange shot her iconic “Migrant Mother” photo of Florence Owens Thompson at a Nipomo pea pickers’ camp in 1936. Library of Congress, public domain.

Her dedication to her craft was deep and unwavering.

“Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion,” she once said. “The subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.”

Lange found that theme on the streets, on the highways, and in the fields during the Great Depression. She found it in breadlines in the cities; among the Dust Bowl refugees who flooded into California, their cars piled high with mattresses, clothes, and whatever else would fit; in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley and the fields of the Central Coast.

It was a visit to one of those fields, at a farm labor camp for pea-pickers off Highway 101 in Nipomo, that produced what would become her defining image: that of a woman named Florence Owens Thompson, the 32-year-old mother of five children, looking out wearily on the world from inside the shelter of a tent. Her stillyoung face is already lined with the wrinkles of worry and hardship as she gazes out on the camp, flanked by two of her children—Katherine and Ruby—clinging to each of her shoulders and hiding their faces from the camera.

Thompson and her family weren’t actually residents of the camp: Their car had broken down on U.S. 101 as they headed north from Los Angeles to Watsonville, and it had been towed as far as the pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo. (Thompson’s two oldest boys had headed into town to see about having it repaired.) The Thompsons weren’t exactly Dust Bowl refugees, either, although she and her husband Cleo Leroy Owens, were both from Oklahoma, where they married in 1921 before moving to Oroville in California. It was there that they became victims of a different kind of tragedy: Thompson’s husband died of an asthma attack in 1931 and was buried in a paupers’ cemetery there.

His widow and children had become migrants in order to survive.

The work was familiar to them: She had picked cotton in Porterville and Shafter, while her husband had worked in sawmills before he died.

Lange happened to arrive at the camp just after Thompson’s car had broken down. She had seen a sign on the highway, between raindrops and windshield wipers, as she headed home on a rainy day: “PEA-PICKERS CAMP.” Her camera was already packed, and she was eager to get home: It would take her seven hours at 65 mph, and she had no interest in stopping to take more photos in the rain.

Or did she?

She had driven 20 miles farther down the road when she decided to turn around and go back.

“Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. I went back those 20 miles and turned off the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS CAMP,” she said. “I was following instinct, not reason; I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction.

“I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Lange’s encounter with the Migrant Mother, as she came to be known, came a year after she had closed her portrait studio and begun working for the federal Farm Security Administration, documenting the plight of the nation’s poor and destitute.

Lange’s other photos of Thompson showed her with a baby cradled under one arm; in two of them, a wildhaired youngster is seen peering out from over her left shoulder. The photos told the story not only of Thompson, but of a generation uprooted by drought and economic disaster. A generation forced to leave foreclosed homes and barren farms that yielded nothing but loose earth raised up by the wind to be as fierce and thick as the locusts from a biblical plague. New wanderers in a different wilderness.

More than half a million Americans were left homeless by the Dust Bowl disaster, and the vast majority of them—Okies and Arkies, families from Texas and Kansas and Nebraska—journeyed west to pursue promises of a better life in California. What they found was more poverty, strife, and disillusionment. California didn’t want them, and Los Angeles Police Chief James “Two-Gun” Davis even set up a “bum blockade” at the state line in an effort to keep them out. He sent 136 officers to crossing points in Arizona, Nevada, and even Oregon to turn back what he called “thieves and thugs.”

Another of Dorothea Lange’s photos shows Florence Thompson’s camp in 1936. Library of Congress, public domain.

Davis bragged that his officers turned back more than 11,000 before their efforts were ruled unconstitutional and the state ordered him to rein in his forces. But countless others made it through, only to face nearly as much hardship as they’d endured in the shattered homes they’d left behind. They knew how to farm, so when they reached California, they found the kind of work they knew—not on their own land, but working for starvation wages in labor camps up and down California’s highways. Conditions were often abysmal, with poor sanitation bringing disease and, often, death.

I’d rather drink muddy water

Sleep out in a hollow log

Than be in California

Treated like a dirty dog.

—Lyrics to a song sung by Dust Bowl refugees

The road was long and tortuous, but some of the migrants made it out of poverty. Unfortunately, Florence Thompson wasn’t one of them. She remarried, had five more children, and did a little bit of everything to take care of them—everything from tending bar to working the fields. She moved to Modesto in 1945, where she worked in a hospital. Still, she struggled to make ends meet and disappeared from public view until a reporter with The Modesto Bee tracked her down living in a trailer in 1978.

There’s no indication she was told about Lange’s quote—her statement that there was “a sort of equality about it” when the two women had met briefly at that pea-pickers’ camp nearly four decades earlier. If she had been, it’s doubtful she would have agreed. The photo of Thompson and her children had helped cement Lange’s legacy as a photographer, but the subject of that photo was still just trying to make ends meet.

“I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t taken my picture,” Thompson said in 1978. “She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”

The Library of Congress, meanwhile, sold prints of her iconic image for $120 apiece.

Five years later, as Thompson was dying of cancer, her children had to ask for donations just to help pay for her medical bills.

All those years later, and she was still struggling to survive.

Through everything, however, she never lost hope. “If I’da lost hope,” she said in a 1979 interview, “this country would never have made it.”

Dorothea Lange holds her camera while seated on top of her automobile in 1936. Library of Congress, public domain.