The Harvest Gypsies, by John Steinbeck, is a series of feature-story articles written on commission for The San Francisco News about the lives and times of migrant workers in California's Central Valley. Published daily from October 5 to 12, 1936, Steinbeck explores and explains the hardships and triumphs of American migrant workers during the Great Depression, tracing their paths and the stories of their lives and travels from one crop harvest to the next crop harvest as they eked out a stark existence as temporary farmhands.
In 1938, the feature-story articles were published as the pamphlet Their Blood Is Strong, by the Simon J. Lubin Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Americans about the socio-economic plight of the migrant worker. The pamphlet included the seven articles, plus Steinbeck's new epilogue "Starvation Under the Orange Trees" and twenty-two photographs of the migrant workers, by Dorothea Lange;Brian E. Railsback, Michael J. Meyer, eds. A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006), 148.James R. Swenson, "Focusing on the Migrant: The Contextualization of Dorothea Lange's Photographs of the John Steinbeck Committee" in A Political Companion to John Steinbeck (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). ten thousand copies of Their Blood Is Strong were sold at twenty-five cents each.Robert DeMott, "Introduction" in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), xxix.
Historical context
Historical background
From 1931 to 1939, drought and soil erosion across the Midwestern and Southern Plains created one of the lasting images of the Great Depression: the Dust Bowl. During this time, over one million Americans emigrated from their native states to California. The number of emigrants was equal to more than twenty percent of the total population of California at the time. The abundance of workers desperate for employment led to extraordinarily low wages, which in turn created widespread underemployment and poverty amongst the migrant workers. Resultant of these conditions were the worker camps, labor strife, and horrific living arrangements described by Steinbeck in The Harvest Gypsies. Steinbeck, a California native himself, sought to capture these new developments and their impact on California culture.John Steinbeck Biography: Early Years", National Steinbeck Center, Retrieved 30 March 2015. He first addressed the issue with his novel In Dubious Battle (1936), which took a harvesters’ strike as its subject. Impressed by the novel, San Francisco News editor George West commissioned Steinbeck to report on the situation with a series of articles in the fall of 1936.
The role of Tom Collins and Sanora Babb Steinbeck obtained significant assistance from Farm Security Administration (FSA) documents, including reports compiled by Tom Collins, manager of a federal camp for migrants in Arvin, CA. Collins compiled these extensive interviews that contained residents' stories, songs, and folklore into a compendium which he shared with Steinbeck, who used it and his own notes to write The Harvest Gypsies.Jackson J. Benson, "To Tom, Who Lived It: John Steinbeck and the Man from Weedpatch," Journal of Modern Literature (April, 1976), 151-94.
Two years after the publication of The Harvest Gypsies, Sanora Babb began working for Collins and contributed notes to the FSA documents. "Unbeknownst to Babb, Collins was sharing her reports with writer John Steinbeck." The subsequent success of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) precluded her publishing of her novel Whose Names Are Unknown, because Random House Publishers in New York feared that the market could not support two novels on the same topic in the same year.
Influence on future literary works The Harvest Gypsies preceded several of Steinbeck's celebrated works with migrant workers at the center, among them Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939)."John Steinbeck Biography: The California Novels" According to Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott, The Harvest Gypsies provided Steinbeck a repository of precise information and folk values: "From countless hours of listening to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them and sharing their problems, Steinbeck drew all the correct details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures, which animate fictional characterization."Robert DeMott, ed. Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (New York: The Viking Press, 1989), pp. xli-xlii). This rich information would figure in his later works, as Steinbeck used the experience to create not only the vibrant characters but also the vivid settings of migrant camps. A host of details first described in The Harvest Gypsies reappear in The Grapes of Wrath, among them Steinbeck's portrayals of the “dignity and decency” of government camps, the widespread hunger and suffering of children, and the injustice of the authorities operating within the camps. Even the famous conclusion of The Grapes of Wrath finds a basis within the account of a stillborn child in The Harvest Gypsies.Steinbeck, 11
Significance in John Steinbeck's career The impact of Steinbeck's investigative reporting for The Harvest Gypsies on his literary career cannot be underestimated, according to scholar William Howarth.William Howarth "The Mother of Literature: Journalism and The Grapes of Wrath" in New Essays on The Grapes of Wrath, David Wyatt, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.71-96. DeMott notes that The Harvest Gypsies "solidified [Steinbeck's] credibility—both in and out of migrant camps—as a serious commentator in a league with Dorothea Lange's husband, Paul Taylor, and Carey McWilliams, two other influential and respected investigators."Robert DeMott, "Introduction" in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), xxix.
Production of the pamphlet Helen Hosmer, a central figure in California labor circles, was responsible for the re-publication of the articles as Their Blood Is Strong. Steinbeck did not initiate the re-publishing of the series. By 1938, he had moved on to writing The Grapes of Wrath full-time and had to be persuaded by Hosmer to get involved in reissuing the series. Hosmer had worked as a researcher for the Farm Security Administration in the mid 1930s, where she met Dorothea Lange and economist Paul Taylor. She met Steinbeck in that period and supplied him with data files she had collected for the Farm Security Administration. After Hosmer left the FSA, she founded the Simon J. Lubin Society to advocate on behalf of workers.Helen Hosmer, Helen Hosmer: A Radical Critic of California Agribusiness in the 1930 (Santa Cruz: University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992), p57-8.Anne Loftis, Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998), p. 168.
According to Hosmer, Steinbeck was reluctant to participate in the project. “He was scared to death of all these left-wingers swarming around,” she said in an oral history interview in 1992.Hosmer, 58. Eventually, Steinbeck agreed to allow Hosmer to publish the series. She combined the articles with Dorothea Lange's photographs and gave the pamphlet its title Their Blood Is Strong.
Hosmer printed a first order of 100 pamphlets and sold them for 25 cents, the proceeds of which went to the Simon J. Lubin Society. Steinbeck did not receive any money from the project. Demand quickly exceeded the first print run and the pamphlet became a valued commodity. Eastern publishing houses contacted Hosmer to try to purchase mint condition copies, offering as much as $100 per pamphlet.Hosmer, 57.
Synopsis
Article I Dated October 5, 1936, Article I serves as a general introduction to the Migrant Farm Worker, which Steinbeck describes as "that shifting group of nomadic, poverty-stricken harvesters driven by hunger and the threat of hunger from crop to crop, from harvest to harvest." Although there are a few migrant workers in Oregon and even Washington, the vast majority came to California; Steinbeck estimates that there are "at least 150,000 homeless migrants wandering up and down the state."Steinbeck 3 This concentration of migrant farm workers in California is due to "the unique nature of California agriculture," in which a crop that for most of the year requires only 20 laborers for maintenance will require 2,000 during harvest time. California requires a large influx of migrant workers during the harvest, which occurs at different times for different crops. Those who hire the migrants encourage their immigration so much that "twice as much labor as was necessary" was present, and wages were kept low.Steinbeck 7
Migrants are essential to the functioning of California's agricultural economy, but, at the same time, they are reviled for being "dirty" and a drain on government support systems - in other words, for being impoverished. "The migrants are needed," Steinbeck states, "and they are hated."Steinbeck 4 A small child living in the "squatter's camp" agrees: "When they need us they call us migrants, and when we've picked their crop, we're bums and we got to get out."Steinbeck 6 The migrants, however, are desperate to get out of poverty. They want nothing more, Steinbeck asserts, than to become economically self-sufficient again: "as they move wearily from harvest to harvest, there is one urge and one overwhelming need, to acquire a little land again, and to settle on it and stop their wandering."Steinbeck 5 They are wanderers not by choice, but because they have no other way to survive.Steinbeck 5 Steinbeck continuously emphasizes the virtues and inherent dignity of these farmers, which serves to make their current destitution all the worse.
The Great Depression sees a transformation in the ethnic make-up of the migrant farmer. In the past, migrant farmers were almost exclusively immigrants - first from China, then Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines (Steinbeck discusses the treatment of non-white/non-American workers more extensively in Article VI).Steinbeck 4Steinbeck, 28-32 But the combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl introduced a new type of migrant worker: the white American family, women and children included. They came from "the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska, and parts of Kansas and Texas" most affected by the Dust Bowl.Steinbeck 4 Steinbeck describes these families as once-prosperous - or at least once self-sustaining - farmers from the Midwest, "resourceful and intelligent Americans" and honest workers who experienced the "curious and terrible pain" of having everything they worked for taken away from them.Steinbeck 4 Throughout the article, Steinbeck cautions his reader that "the old methods of repression...are not going to work [because] these are American people."Steinbeck 6 It is not that Steinbeck believes that non-white races deserve worse treatment than Americans; Article VII expresses Steinbeck's belief that American treatment of non-white migrant farmers has generally been "a disgraceful picture of greed and cruelty" by American farm owners.Steinbeck, 28 American migrants are different, Steinbeck believes, not because they necessarily deserve better treatment but because they will (in theory) refuse to tolerate the horrible conditions under which immigrant farmers labored. Thus, Steinbeck urges his readers to be prepared to "work out the problem to their benefit as well as ours."Steinbeck 6
Article II