33 pages • 1 hour read
John SteinbeckThe Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Article 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Article 1 Summary
Published on October 5, 1936, this is the first article that Steinbeck wrote about migrant farmworkers for the San Francisco News. He wrote that there were at least 150,000 migrants fueled by hunger and poverty traversing the state of California, making them “an army large enough to make it important to every person in the state” (19). He described their ramshackle camps by the sides of the highway, which frequently disappeared as the migrants moved around the state in search of work. Steinbeck noted that the migrants were in a unique position, as they were both needed to pluck the state’s crop—which quickly rotted if not plucked—and despised by native Californians, who believed that the migrants were a drain on local resources and carried disease.
Steinbeck stated that these itinerant farmworkers came to California from places like Oklahoma, Nebraska, and regions of Kansas and Texas. The migrants fled to California because the Dust Bowl had wreaked havoc on their small, family-owned farms back home, destroying their means of supporting themselves and their children. These largely white refugees of the Dust Bowl were different from the mostly foreign—Mexican and Asian—workers who farmed the fields prior to their arrival. These new migrants desired to purchase and settle on a piece of land so that they could stop moving between different harvest areas and living in squatters’ camps.
Steinbeck described the crops that these migrant workers harvested, which included vegetables such as lettuce, tomatoes, cauliflower, and cabbage. These vegetables had to be watered, cultivated using a hoe, harvested, and then packed for transportation. Fruit like oranges, apricots, and grapes were also in demand in various parts of the state, though the sometimes short and brutal harvesting seasons left migrants overworked during certain times and without work at other times. The hungry migrant families had to hurry to harvesting sites in order to secure work before they filled up, as there were many other workers eager to take their place. As Steinbeck noted: “And so they move frantically, with starvation close behind them” (25).
Article 1 Analysis
Steinbeck began his series of articles by tackling the roots of xenophobia against the migrant workers, whom he referred to in this article as gypsies—hence the title of the series of articles: Harvest Gypsies. The gypsies are a nomadic group of people, known as the Roma, who migrated across Europe and Asia; they face widespread discrimination for their nomadic lifestyle. Steinbeck found it fitting to describe the ever-migrating farmworkers in California using the same term.
Steinbeck also highlighted the class differences between the foreign-born workers and white migrant workers from the Midwest. Unlike many of the immigrant workers, the white migrant farm workers had often been solidly middle-class people, many of whom had owned their own farms prior to the Dust Bowl. These white farm workers suffered a significant drop in status and wealth when they fled their home, but they still remembered their more prosperous times, which imbued them with a sense of pride. As Steinbeck wrote: “ […] they are not migrants by nature. They are gypsies by force of circumstances” (22).
Steinbeck’s first article also briefly touched upon the difference between small agrarian farms and the large corporate agriculture that consumed most of the state’s industry. The large-scale growers had very short and very intense harvesting periods that forced migrants to move around the state during the seasons and to compete with other migrants for cheap labor. Steinbeck highlighted the unique position of the migrants, who were despised by many Californians—and even the growers they worked for—but were essential to the state’s agricultural sector, in quoting a young boy who said: “When they need us, they call migrants, and when we’ve picked their crops, we’re bums and we got to get out” (24). Steinbeck found this system of exploited migrant labor to be not only inhumane, but also unsustainable for the long-term prospects of California agriculture. We begin to see in this article Steinbeck’s sympathies for the workers and his passionate defense of labor organizing.
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