The Harvest Gypsies: Setting & Context
A migrant camp in Marysville, California, in the 1930s.
The 1930s were a challenging time in American history. Not only was the nation confronted with the economic crisis of the Great Depression, but the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl severely exacerbated the crisis by causing the evacuation of large portions of America's Central Plains. What was once the "bread basket of the nation," was literally blowing away after years of severe drought and unsound agricultural practices, which failed to sustain the integrity of the earth's topsoil. The damage was extensive. According to a timeline published by PBS.org, "The 'Yearbook of Agriculture' for 1934 announce[d], 'Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production. . . . 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil. . . .' ("Timeline of the Dust Bowl"). Besides obliterating crop production and thus employment opportunities, the area, overtaken by frequent massive clouds of blowing dust, became completely unlivable.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of Plains' residents hit the road in anything with wheels and took an often desperate and dangerous trip to California looking for work. As Steinbeck was coming of age as a writer, California was being inundated with hundreds of thousands of refugees. The results of the catastrophe are movingly recorded in both The Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The already tense labor situation became even more strained as agitators worked amongst the migrants seeking to organize the labor pool. Strikes and vigilante violence were commonplace as the growers', suspicious of Communist organizers and sympathizers, sought to protect their interests against the mass of starving migrants looking for work in the state.
The untenable situation gained the attention of the Federal Government and several New Deal administrative programs, such as the Farm Security Administration and Resettlement Administration, were developed to help bring order to the area and some relief to the displaced and impoverished migrants. Many migrants sought refuge in Federal camps, which had the benefit of running water, sanitation, medical supplies and opportunities for children to attend school. Though many camps were planned for construction, few were actually built. Most migrants were left to fend for their own survival in filthy and diseased squatters camps on the sides of California's roadways.
A migrant farm worker’s roadside camp in California, as photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936.
Outraged by the migrants' living conditions, Steinbeck and other artists and civic and religious charity associations did their best to draw the nation's attention to the migrants. While the end result of The Harvest Gypsies, The Grapes of Wrath, did seem to have an impact on the national conscience, as Charles Wollenberg explains in his introduction to The Harvest Gypsies, "Even the popularity of The Grapes of Wrath, however, did not produce significant public programs to assist the migrants. […] By the end of 1940, reporter Ernie Pyle noted that the Okies no longer made headlines: 'people sort of forgot them.'"(xvi).
While many of the migrants eventually found employment in the booming wartime industry after the beginning of WW II, agriculture in California was abandoned to return to its heavy reliance on imported foreign labor. Thanks to proximity and deals brokered between the US and Mexico, more and more Mexican farm labor was eventually imported to sustain California's system of industrialized agriculture. Though the new farm laborers' social situation is different than that of the American migrants of the 1930s, the Mexican immigrants today still face stiff social prejudice, strong anti-labor sentiments, and laws meant to restrict their access to public benefits, much like the Dust Bowl migrants.
