1936 It’s often forgotten that The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was not John Steinbeck’s first novel about migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley. That was called In Dubious Battle (1936), and it wasn’t very good. It was about a strike. To gather information on it, Steinbeck had relied on a few second-hand accounts. He wanted his plot to prove a theory he had heard from his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, that men in a group behave like cells in the body, not thinking or acting for themselves but for the greater organism.
As a result, In Dubious Battle didn’t work, either as fiction or documentary – hazy on concrete detail, its characters mouthing set philosophical and political positions. Though the migrant workers had won the actual strike on which the story was based, they had to lose it in the novel, in order to conform to the pre-existent theory.
Never mind, In Dubious Battle made Steinbeck look as though he knew something about conditions down on the farm, so when the San Francisco News, a liberal evening daily, wanted to cover the residential camps set up by Roosevelt’s New Deal to keep the migrant ‘Okies’ and their families out of the drainage ditches where they were washing and going to the toilet, they asked the novelist to investigate.
This was journalism, not fiction, so it was going to require some real fact-finding about local people and conditions, rather than half-baked biologistic theories. So Steinbeck travelled down the Central Valley, finally winding up at Weedpatch, the leading government camp near Arvin, where he found out about the systems for welcoming migrant families, keeping them dry, clean and happily occupied between jobs, and fending off the landowners’ vigilantes. Meeting the migrants face to face, hearing them speak, sitting in on their meetings, Steinbeck quickly came to recognise them as something more than cells in a larger organism.
‘The Harvest Gypsies’, as his articles were called, appeared as seven full-page pieces in the News, from 5 to 12 October 1936, illustrated by the government documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (see 26 May). A survey of the migrants’ living conditions outside the government camps began with the material facts as experienced on the ground:
The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river, the wife of the family scrubs clothes without soap and tries to rinse out the mud in muddy water. The spirit of this family is not quite broken, for the children, three of them, still have clothes, and the family possesses three old quilts and a soggy, lumpy mattress.
THEN COME THE RAINS
With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush; in a few months the clothes will fray off the children’s bodies while the lack of nourishing food will subject the whole family to pneumonia when the first cold comes.
Families barely subsist; they are terrified of starvation, the children too weak to go to school. Medical attention hardly exists.
Shock details were reinforced by analysis. Steinbeck went back into history, explaining how California farms had evolved, not through thousands of individual settlements, but through a few large landholdings subdivided again and again. Then he explained how many of the big farms were owned by absentee landlords, banks and corporations, and managed by supervisors, before showing how the new government camps were working.
Besides being one of the best pieces of investigative journalism to come out of the Depression, ‘The Harvest Gypsies’ opened the door to The Grapes of Wrath, awakening in Steinbeck a genuine sympathy for the Okies and their political struggle, and teaching him the value of minutely-observed particulars as a way of setting a scene and piquing the reader’s participation in bringing the picture to life.