The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [14]
And so they move, frantically, with starvation close behind them. And in this series of articles we shall try to see how they live and what kind of people they are, what their living standard is, what is done for them, and what their problems and needs are. For while California has been successful in its use of migrant labor, it is gradually building a human structure which will certainly change the state, and may, if handled with the inhumanity and stupidity that have characterized the past, destroy the present system of agricultural economics.
The immersion experience was invaluable, and the importance of journalism in Steinbeck’s development cannot be underestimated, as William Howarth claims in Wyatt’s New Essays. Written mostly in a measured style to promote understanding and intelligent solutions, Steinbeck’s articles are full of case studies, chilling factual statistics, and an unsettling catalogue of human woes (illness, incapacitation, persecution, death) observed from close contact with field workers he had met. In the spirit of advocacy journalism, Steinbeck concluded with prophetic recommendations for alleviating the conflict with federal aid and local support; this in turn would create subsistence farms, establish a migratory labor board, encourage unionization, and punish terrorism. When they were published in 1936 (and again when they were reprinted verbatim in 1938 as Their Blood Is Strong, a pamphlet by the nonprofit Simon J. Lubin Society that sold ten thousand copies at twenty-five cents each), Steinbeck’s articles solidified his 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.
Steinbeck understood that the migrants would not vanish from sight, even though official California hoped they would. He also knew that the subject reached further than he had first imagined. Consequently, Steinbeck built on his News pieces and made at least one more monthlong field trip with Tom Collins in October and November 1937. They started from Gridley, where Collins was managing a new camp, but then roamed California from Stockton to Needles, wherever migrants were gathered at work. His purpose was to gather more research for his next version, the “big” book of fiction that had been in his mind for most of that year. (A letter to Elizabeth Otis, written on January 27, 1937, indicates that he had been wrestling with this version since the previous winter: “The new book has struck a bad snag. . . . The subject is so huge it scares me to death.”) In an interview with Dorothy Steel on November 4, 1937, in the Los Gatos Mail News, Steinbeck told of starting a book whose topic was the Dust Bowl refugees, the “Oklahomans.” Though he was “reluctant to discuss the characters and plot,” he said it was “one-third complete and will be about 1,000 pages in length.” Given his comment to Otis, and the fact that Steinbeck traveled a good deal that year, three hundred pages of completed manuscript may have been wishful thinking on his part, or it may gave represented the total number of pages of reports and research notes he had accumulated thus far.
In a second interview two months later, with journalist Louis Walther on January 8, 1938, in the San Jose Mercury Herald, he apparently had not progressed much, if at all. After hitting several “snags,” he was working on a “rather long novel” called “The Oklahomans,” which was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to Walther to indicate that his novel’s focus was the salutary, irrepressible character of the “southern dust bowl migrants” who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California.