The Harvest Gypsies

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.

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;[2][3] ten thousand copies of Their Blood Is Strong were sold at twenty-five cents each.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

[18] 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.

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).

[33] 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.

[36] 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.

Steinbeck pays great attention to highlight how the Depression has impacted the families in the squatter camps by tracing their economic degeneration, and the intense precision and consistency that their agricultural work demands.

[41] Additionally, he notes the tempered optimism that many new residents had, and works to humanize the squatters: their desire to educate their children, and the loss of loved ones that marks their lives evoke sympathy.

[50] Making things worse, the poor were often ignorant of how to utilize the free clinics that supposedly existed to serve them, and skeptical of the interaction with authorities that pursuing health services would entail.

"[52] He closes Article II by making a plea for sympathy: if some of the squatters steal, or begin to express a distaste for the relatively affluent, "the reason is not to be sought in their origin nor in any tendency to weakness in their character.

Dated October 7, 1936 Steinbeck's third article explores the system of oppression that large farms have developed so as to maintain their complete control over the lives of migrant workers.

The family consists of a fifty-year-old father, a forty-five-year-old mother, two sons, fifteen and twelve, and a six-year-old daughter traveling to California in their truck, starting off picking oranges.

[67] The overarching problem, Steinbeck writes, was the singular focus on the immediate economy, and the inability to recognize the long term value of a strong labor force.

[70] Merely in financial terms, "the nature of California's agriculture made the owners of farm land cry for peon labor," a situation that Steinbeck found despicable.

Besides the usual tactics of racially motivated attacks and changing immigration laws, the desire of Mexico to repatriate their departed citizens led many of the Mexican workers to leave California and return to their home country.

[92] In addition, these communities would have access to medical attention, shared farm equipment, self-government, and “trained agriculturist[s] to instruct the people in scientific farming.”[93] Steinbeck suggests that the federal government should cover the cost of such a project, pointing out that “The cost of such ventures would not be much greater than the amount which is now spent for tear gas, machine guns and ammunition, and deputy sheriffs,” referencing contemporary labor conflict between farm owners and migrant workers.

He observes that the “attitude of the employer on the ranch is one of hatred and suspicion, his method is the threat of his deputies' guns.”[103] Any successful organization of labor would force the owners of large farms to provide better living and working conditions, which in turn would cut into profit margins.

Article II, in particular, details the dire consequences of poor sanitation of Hoovervilles, or "squatter camps" as Steinbeck refers to the shantytowns in the California valley.

One of the three families he writes about had recently suffered the loss of one child; a four-year-old boy had been sick, poorly nourished and appeared feverish, then, "one night he went into convulsions and died."

In his discussion of challenges to normal pregnancy in Article V, he tells the poignant story of a woman who had multiple miscarriages, due to work accidents, sickness, and malnutrition.

In detailing several of the narratives of migrant workers and their families, Steinbeck raises the concept of dignity, or pride, and how it wavered and diminished depending on what hardships were suffered and what level of poverty was reached.

Steinbeck attributes their presence in California's fields to the "cry for peon labor" issued by farm owners seeking to maximize profits and minimize costs.

[119] Again, like with the Chinese, Steinbeck points out their standard of living and ability to subsist on depressed wages that made them preferable to white labor, particularly with the rise of intensive farming practices.

UC Berkeley history professor James Gregory, in a mixed review of a Heyday Books 1988 edition of the pamphlet, argues that Steinbeck's harsh treatment of agribusiness ignores the potential for exploitation in small family farms.

"[127] Historian Charles Wollenberg, in the introduction to the 1988 edition, attacks Steinbeck's assertion that unionization was inevitable because whites would "insist on a standard of living far higher than that which was accorded foreign 'cheap labor'" as ethnocentric and misguided.

The Joads and their fellow Okies ultimately found economic salvation, not in the small farms they dreamed of owning, but in urban industry fueled by billions of federal dollars.