A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  The book’s gestation mirrors that of Steinbeck’s other Los Gatos novel, The Grapes of Wrath. During his Los Gatos years, when his political sensibilities were acutely tuned, conception of subject and character preceded structure and style. The subject of Of Mice and Men was an incident occurring a dozen years earlier: In the mid-1920s, Steinbeck had seen a troubled man kill a straw boss, and he told a New York reporter that this gave him the story. Characters most likely emerged from his past as well: Lennie is one of several “unfinished people” in Steinbeck’s canon, those with the sensibilities of a child. He knew one such boy in Salinas, a child most often seen outside Bell’s Candy Store. Each Easter the boy was given a rabbit, and in the week following he would pet the rabbit to death.

  But story and character needed context, “the wall of background” he found necessary for fictional resonance. Steinbeck, a natural storyteller, wrote searingly about marginalized Americans because he took such care to create resonant lives. Before he left Pacific Grove, he asked friends if they remembered the name for someone who cleaned out a bunkhouse—swamper was the word he wanted, Candy’s position. His dialogue is razor sharp: “For too long the language of books was different from the language of men. To the men I write about profanity is adornment and ornament and is never vulgar and I try to write it so.” And the enclosed spaces of Of Mice and Men—clearing, bunkhouse, and barn, each exactingly described—re-enact the shuttered lives of working stiffs.

  “The Harvest Gypsies”

  Steinbeck’s partisanship took on a messianic edge in the late summer of 1936, when George West, editorial page editor of the liberal San Francisco News, asked him to write about the miserable housing conditions of dust-bowl migrants pouring into California to pick crops. Numbers are estimated at over half a million during the decade of the 1930s, all envisioning California as the promised land, most finding only seasonal work, substandard or no housing, and great antagonism on the part of resident Californians, wary of the migrants’ poverty, southern drawl, “hard-lookin’” appearance, and mostly Baptist fervor. Steinbeck’s imprimatur on a six-part exposé on available housing, the line of thinking went, would help garner support for the recently launched federal camp program for migrants.

  A photograph by Dorothea Lange of the Arvin migrant camp, near Bakersfield, circa 1938. Lange worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. She documented the world that Steinbeck wrote about in his journalism and fiction; her photos accompanied Steinbeck’s articles for the San Francisco News that were were published as “The Harvest Gypsies.” Those articles were later collected and published as Their Blood Is Strong.

  As reporter and witness, Steinbeck left Los Gatos in August 1936 for the Kern County Hoovervilles, makeshift roadside settlements, and then toured one of the new federal camps set up near Bakersfield, the second such federally funded camp established in California. (Eventually fifteen would be constructed around the state. The Arvin camp is still open.) He read camp manager Tom Collins’s detailed reports of the migrants’ woes and spoke to destitute Oklahomans. In October 1936, the News published his series of six articles, called “The Harvest Gypsies.” He said he used the word gypsies ironically: “It seemed to me an irony that people like these should be forced to live the life of gypsies,” he wrote to Tom Collins, apologizing if he hurt people’s feelings with his title. Those lucid exposés ask that the reader participate in the actuality of gypsy life. His prose nudges readers on a visual tour of makeshift houses built “by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet against them. A few branches are placed over the top to keep out the noonday sun. It would not turn water at all. There is no bed.”

  That first investigative journey, from Los Gatos through Salinas to Bakersfield and back, altered Steinbeck’s life and career. On the way home, he saw his hometown of Salinas arming itself for one of the nastiest California labor strikes of the late 1930s. What he’d witnessed on the road realigned his sensibilities, giving him a new subject, a new cast of characters, and an altered sense of place. He wrote to his agent immediately after the trip:

  I’ve seen such terrific things in the squatters’ camps that I can’t think out of them right now. There’s Civil War making right under my nose. I’ve got to see it and feel it. I have a lot now … I start on another play tomorrow and I think it will be a good one. It is to be laid in a squatter camp in Kern County. Instead of stage direction I’ll furnish photographs. This thing is happening now and it’s incredibly rich dramatically.

  Tom Collins, manager of the Arvin camp near Bakersfield, photographed by Dorothea Lange.

  The cover of Their Blood Is Strong, photo by Dorothea Lange.

  This urgent letter taps issues at the core of Steinbeck’s documentary imagination: the journalist’s need to witness events firsthand, the documentary artist’s ability to emotionally grip life as lived, and the writer’s search for a pattern of expression. The migrant play was never written—it was not the proper vehicle for his story. But The Grapes of Wrath had its gestation in that journalistic assignment, the novel’s soul laid out in that letter to his agent. To tell the migrant story accurately, he’d meld his life and art with theirs.

  The writer who resided in Los Gatos, who depended heavily on Carol to edit his prose, and who enjoyed Los Gatos friends who solaced him with food and wine was nonetheless imaginatively absent. His became a gypsy existence. A writer can’t write about “the Proletariat,” he wrote Henry Thornton Moore, “whatever they are, unless you have lived with them and worked and lifted things and fought and drank with them…. All the terms are phony—proletarian—bourgeois … it’s all just people. Write about people not classes.” That Steinbeck would do. During the fall and winter of 1937-38, he visited migrant camps; he may have gone back to Oklahoma and come West with the migrants (as his friend Joseph Henry Jackson claimed), or he may have established himself as a laborer and worked with the migrants, as the Los Gatos paper claimed. Steinbeck kept his gypsy life, his research, under wraps.

  The Grapes of Wrath

  The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck’s quintessential California fiction. In what many claim is his greatest novel, he shook free his imagination to embrace the state itself. More than any other novel he wrote, place is movement through space, migrants dreaming of California for more than a third of the novel, living across California for the rest. This novel pits Oklahoma entropy against Western fecundity, as migrants journey from “a place of sadness and worry and defeat” to California, “a new mysterious place.”

  As the Joads near California, they give voice to the state’s allure, its legendary status. In California they hear that a “fella near the coast” (William Randolph Hearst, no doubt) “got a million acres,” holdings so vast and unimaginable that it inspires a sermon from Casy. Steinbeck’s migrants confront the authoritative blue mountains that guard the state, the “jagged ramparts” depicted on the stunning cover of the first edition. The majestic Colorado River cuts a boundary that several characters in the novel can’t pass. A “terrible” desert, “bones ever’place,” tests resolve as carloads of dreamers pass from Needles to Bakersfield. In Steinbeck’s hands, the migrants’ journey is a mythic passage to a land of tall tales and visionary acres. The Joads’s first vista after Tehachapi Pass seems to encompass the whole of that mythical land: “The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses…. The distant cities, the little towns in the orchard land, and the morning sun, golden on the valley.”

  The 1936 Salinas Lettuce Strike

  Between 1930 and 1938, more than 150 strikes took place in rural California. Wages were low, housing for migrant workers was miserable, and civil liberties were abused by organizations such as California’s Associated Farmers—businessmen, chambers of commerce, growers, and shippers—determined to crush labor unrest. Abuses were documented thoroughly by several individuals, incl
uding economist Paul Taylor from Berkeley, photographer Dorothea Lange, and lawyer and activist Carey McWilliams from Los Angeles—and John Steinbeck.

  In the fall of 1936 Steinbeck wrote, “There are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born. I shouldn’t wonder if the thing had begun. I don’t mean any general revolt but an active beginning aimed toward it, the smoldering.”

  From 1920 to 1930, annual American consumption of lettuce went from 2.3 pounds to 8.3 pounds per person. Growing and shipping lettuce—”green gold,” as it came to be known—made fortunes for Salinas farmers who were, in fact, running industrial operations. For workers who packed lettuce for shipping, it was a wet, cold, demanding job. One worker recalled in an interview,

  They used to get the 300-pound blocks of ice … they didn’t have crushers like now…. They had these ice picks, you know, and they’d shave it, you know, they’d keep chopping…. At that time they used to put it in a wheelbarrow … and then you’d wheel the wheelbarrow to the packers there who were packing the lettuce, and then they would pack one layer of lettuce, and get a scoop of ice, and put the scoop of ice in the crate … then one layer of lettuce, scoop of ice, another layer of lettuce, and another scoop of ice. Then they would put the lid on, the paper, they had a paper there that would hold the ice in, and lid the crate. Then they would load the crates [about 70 pounds each] into a refrigerated car… and then the loader… he would chop the ice into little blocks… he would pick the ice and throw it on top. He would put the ice on top of the crates.

  Wages paid for this work, as for picking crops, slipped steadily during the 1930s. In 1936, shed workers were requesting exclusive representation by their union, the Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union, an affiliate of the moderate American Federation of Labor. Unlike field-workers, who were Filipino or Mexican in the mid-1930s, shed workers were largely white.

  Tear gassing during the Salinas lettuce strike, 1936.

  The growers and shippers of Salinas were ready for a battle—no compromises considered in demands for recognizing unions. They consolidated shipping to one packing operation in Salinas and one in Watsonville and built ten-foot-high barbed fences around each, importing scab workers and guarding the areas with squads armed with tear gas, clubs, and firearms.

  The “battle of Salinas” was a large, vicious strike. It pitted white migrants, “the red menace” against “embattled farmers,” the latter a well-oiled cooperative effort involving the powerful Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of Central California (a newly formed citizens association), armed Salinas citizenry, and the California Highway Patrol. Joining them in the most bitter moments was a visiting self-styled “coordinator”—Steinbeck called him “the General”—who urged Salinas citizens to take up arms, fulminating that this was war, reds against patriotic Americans. “For a full fortnight the ‘constituted authorities’ of Salinas have been but the helpless pawns of sinister fascist forces which have operated from a barricaded hotel floor in the center of town,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. (“Now what happened would not be believable,” writes Steinbeck, “if it were not verified by the Salinas papers of the time.”)

  This nasty strike may well have been the basis for Steinbeck’s quickly written, angry 1938 diatribe against “Salinas fat cats,” “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” The satiric manuscript was a “job,” “a vicious book, a mean book,” he wrote his agent, that “has a lot of poison in it that I have to get out of my system.” A month later he destroyed it, turning once again to his more tempered novel about migrant workers, The Grapes of Wrath.

  That vista midway through The Grapes of Wrath hovers over the whole—California as an agricultural paradise supporting human endeavor. “The spring is beautiful in California,” Steinbeck writes in chapter 25, where visionary California collides with starvation California. “The prunes lengthen like little green bird’s eggs, and the limbs sag down against the crutches under the weight.” But fruit rots because industrialized agriculture can’t make enough money picking it. “And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.” For migrants, the reality of California is a road, temporary shelters, scant food, and brutal advice to keep on moving. Steinbeck’s great achievement in The Grapes of Wrath is to keep his readers’ gaze steadily on the state’s two great truths: its panoramic promise and its brutal realities.

  It took Steinbeck months to contain his anger at what he saw on the road, months casting about for tone and a pattern for the migrant story. He planned a “four pound book,” he told his agent late in 1936, “a devil of a long hard book.” Eighteen months later he wrote her again, “Yes, I’ve been writing on the novel but I’ve had to destroy it several times.” During those eighteen months he had considered other artistic patterns for the material: a play with photographs, a satire on Salinas “fat cats.” In between those aborted projects he apparently agreed to a collaboration with Horace Bristol and to edit camp manager Tom Collins’s weekly reports on migrant conditions near Bakersfield, writing a preface for the book. In the months when The Grapes of Wrath was taking form, his imagination was in overdrive. None of the collaborative projects, nor the nasty satire, bore fruit, but a letter to Collins about editing his reports is a fine example of how Steinbeck bridged the terrain between reportorial and fictive prose. It’s one of his most telling statements of the artistic process generating The Grapes of Wrath, turning fact into fiction.

  I’ve worked out a plan for presenting this material, but it doesn’t depart much from your plan. The dialect in this human side must be worked over because it is the hardest thing in the world to get over…. Above all we need songs, as many as we can get. For songs are the direct and true expression of a people. Maybe we can get them to bring them to us in their own spelling. That would be the best of all….

  We’ll put the songs in and of course the histories. They are fine. Throughout the thing will be more on the human side than on any other. Then there is the one other thing I want to mention. In all of the stories there is no personal description. I have seen the people enough so that I could describe the speaker and it wouldn’t be the real person who spoke but enough like him or her so that it would be essentially true. Do you think that is all right? But they do have to be described. If this works out as I hope it will I should like to include photographs of people, of the place of the activities.

  The letter suggests how closely linked fiction and nonfiction were for Steinbeck. Collins composed painstakingly accurate reports, but they needed the context of the fiction writer’s gaze to bring the people to life. They needed the impact of documentary realism—art relying on the interplay among photographs, music, dialogue, reportage—to make the people real; the documentary impulse of the 1930s was didactic art that moved people’s sensibilities through visual commentary, the mind bound to the heart. A commitment to the personal and evocative is evident in all that Steinbeck and other documentary artists created in the 1930s.

  The back of this photo, by Dorothea Lange, reads, “Nipomo, California. March 1936. Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children and their mother, aged 32. The father is a native Californian.”

  For Steinbeck, gone was the artistic detachment of In Dubious Battle. His fiction and his nonfiction during his Los Gatos years measure the human toll of struggling for “a better kinder life.” The difference between his fiction and his journalism is a matter of “levels,” one of his favorite words to describe the depth of his fiction. Rooted in journalistic precision, Steinbeck’s fiction is nonetheless just that, fiction and not historical fact—a distinction that was missed by countless reviewers of The Grapes of Wrath, who took Steinbeck to task for the color of Salisaw dirt and the Joads’s balance book and the accuracy of Associated Farmers burning migrant camps. The book is historical, fictive, ecological (land and water use), and mythic, its pattern a quilt, a patched-together narrative of dialogue, freeze-frame visuals, musical intonations, and pano
ramic vistas.

  During Steinbeck’s era of partisanship, the late 1930s, he committed himself fully to the task of finding a novelistic “pattern” that honored migrants and, more broadly, the enduring American belief in “a new life.” He insisted that the lyrics of Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War anthem, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” be printed in the endpapers of the first edition of The Grapes of Wrath. He insisted on the book’s American heart—on the eve of attacks that would accuse him of communist leanings.

  Once the novel was complete, Steinbeck moved on from his position as migrant partisan and spokesman—although never ceasing to champion ordinary Americans. In the months following the April 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck left behind the migrant material, Los Gatos, and Carol, his wife of a decade.

  Los Gatos: Gem City of the Foothills

  Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, Los Gatos was, from its inception, a California idyll, a pastoral retreat without Carmel’s pretensions to art, without Pacific Grove’s Methodists, without Monterey’s Spanish roots or Salinas’s incredibly fertile soil. Located at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it became a locus of trade and transportation, a thriving market town. Los Gatos was a town of lumber mills and vineyards, orchards, and farms. Chickens were raised here; French prunes and apricots were grown in the town and on nearby mountains. A stream, Los Gatos Creek, tumbled from those mountains and was once full of trout and a spawning ground for salmon. For twenty square miles to the north of town, fruit trees bloomed and flourished in the Santa Clara Valley. At the south of the town, a winding road climbed and dipped its way to Santa Cruz over the steep coastal range.