Not counting the scotched plan to edit and publish Collins’s reports, an abandoned play set in a squatters’ camp in Kern County, or a warm-up essay (in the September 12, 1936, issue of The Nation), Steinbeck’s first lengthy excursion into the migrants’ problems was published in the liberal, pro-labor San Francisco News. “The Harvest Gypsies” formed the foundation of Steinbeck’s concern for a long time to come, raised issues and initiated forces, gave him a working vocabulary with which to understand current events, and furthered his position as a reliable interpreter. This stage resulted from the notoriety caused by his recently published strike novel, In Dubious Battle (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), after which Steinbeck found—often against his will—that he was fast being considered a sympathetic spokesman for the contemporary agricultural labor situation in a state that was primarily pro-management. This was a profound irony, because while In Dubious Battle exposed the capitalist dynamics of corporate farming, it took no side for or against labor, preferring instead to see the fruit strike as a symbol of “man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.”
At George West’s invitation, Steinbeck produced “The Harvest Gypsies.” These articles, peppered with Dorothea Lange’s graphic photographs of migrants, appeared from October 5 to 12, 1936. Steinbeck’s gritty reports detailed the plan of California’s feudal agricultural labor industry. The pieces introduced the antagonists, underscored the anachronistic rift between the Okie agrarian past and the mechanized California present, explained the economic background and insidious effects of the labor issue, examined the deplorable migrant living conditions, and exposed the unconscionable practices of the interlocking conglomerate of corporation farms. (These elements remained central to the core and texture of The Grapes of Wrath.) Primarily, though, Steinbeck’s eye was on the migrants, who were “gypsies by force of circumstance,” as he announced in his opening piece: “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.”
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 union ization, and punish terrorism. When they were published in 1936(and again when they were reprinted as Their Blood Is Strong, a pamphlet by the nonprofit Simon J. Lubin Society that sold 10,000 copies), Steinbeck’s articles solidified his credibility—both in and out of the 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 wouldn’t 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 of 1937. They started from Gridley, where Collins was managing a new camp, but then roamed California from Stockton to Needles, wherever migrants were gathered to 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 1000 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 have represented the total number of pages of reports and research notes he had accumulated thus far.