By 1936, the Great Depression and the economic devastation it wrought had been punishing the American people for six hard years. While Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd U.S. President, had just been inaugurated months earlier, his New Deal policies had yet to brighten the bleak mood of the American people.
Meanwhile, in the Oklahoma Panhandle, poor agricultural practices combined with chronic drought turned farmers' topsoil to dust along with any prospects they might have had for a harvest, no matter how paltry.
Prevailing winds picked up the dust (formerly rich topsoil from the Oklahoma Panhandle) and transported it an easterly direction.
When mud-brown, billowing clouds started drifting over New York City a few days later, a journalist coined the term "Dust Bowl" to describe what was happening in Oklahoma, and the name stuck for all time.
While the clouds carried the topsoil east, many Oklahoma farmers having no way to repay the loans they had taken out to plant their crops that spring, headed west. Economically ruined, but hearing enticing stories about their being "plenty of jobs to be had" in California,they packed up their belongings in their family Model-T Fords and followed Route 66 from Oklahoma to California.
Unfortunately, far more "Oakies" were arriving in the fertile San Fernando Valley than were needed as laborers to harvest the crops. Uprooted from Oklahoma but now penniless, with nothing to eat, slim prospects for work, and no place to go, the Oakies crowded into migrant labor camps that had been set up by the State of California to feed and house them and relieve their suffering.
That same year the San Francisco News, sensing a humanitarian tragedy in the making essentially on their doorstep, commissioned novelist John Steinbeck to write a seven-part series titled Harvest Gypsies about the plight of the displaced "Okies." The articles he wrote were published in October and early November of 1936.
(Of course the circumstances causing it are totally different, but if you've heard about the "camp" for displaced Middle-eastern immigrants that sprang up and still exists in Calais, France, it might provide an instructive modern-day analogy to what was going on in the San Fernando Valley in the fall of 1936. The overcrowding and dangerously poor health conditions in the Calais camp, especially during the Covid Pandemic, bespeak the plight of an abjectly poor, displaced and highly vulnerable group of economic refugees, which can be compared and contrasted with the plight of the "Oakies" in 1936.
Even before 1936, the State of California had set up a number of migrant labor camps to serve itinerant laborers and help alleviate suffering by housing them in humane conditions.
Tom Collins, the director of one of those migrant camps, the one called "The Arvin," wrote a series of reports about the conditions experienced by the Okies as they flooded into the California camps.
Of course, Steinbeck visited the camps himself and conducted interviews with the migrant laborers there, but knowing the controversy that was likely to be aroused by his passionate defense of the "Okies" as being exploited by a corrupt system gone awry, the author used Collins reports in researching his San Francisco News articles, as well as when he drafted his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath first published in 1939. In Steinbeck's writer's journal, which he kept at the time, he wrote, "I need this stuff [Collin's reports]. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong." He certainly comprehended the sensitive and controversial nature of what he was writing about.
Eighteen of Collins's reports are available on EDSITEment.com, which is a National Endowment for the Arts website devoted to "driving excellence in humanities education."
According to the website, "comparing the reports to The Grapes of Wrath offers students a rare look into a writer's process of converting nonfiction material into fiction."
In coming months I will explore what I consider this "rare find," but in the remainder of this essay, I'd like to emphasize that in my view the power and authenticity of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic tale of the Joad family, derive from it being scrupulously fact-based. I believe the passion very much in evidence in Steinbeck's voice as you read his work derives from the truth of it, as if the work itself wants to cry out and say, "What you're reading was once an American tragedy that happened to so many families just like the Joads during those very dark days."
If one simply reads chapter one, which is only four pages in length, one immediately understands this is a work of fiction based on fact:
"The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet."
Without ever using the word "drought" or ever coming out and telling the reader that Steinbeck here is describing the climatic conditions that bring a stubborn drought into existence, the author patiently describes the pre-conditions for drought, until, "The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as the day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.
"Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes."
Sounds a little like life during Covid, doesn't it? The pervasive sadness is the same as during a pandemic. I think it's the ever-present and inescapable notion that something very fundamental is very wrong. In the case of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, we find that along with damaging crops, drought damages human beings' spirits:
"The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break… Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant… Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was much to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still—thinking—figuring."
Steinbeck's writing here is spiritual, spare and elegiac; the deep sadness the people feel is evident; as well, the extra weight placed on the men just to comprehend what is happening to them, no less find a solution. Indeed, before Steinbeck has finished telling his story some men will be broken and some families, ripped apart.
Next month, more about how Steinbeck dramatized the real human tragedy occurring in Oklahoma and California in 1936 by inventing the Joad family and telling its story.
