John Steinbeck brief essay

In this text, the novelist John Steinbeck reflects on the historical significance of the educational bulletins for migrant farm workers that he saved in his collection. Steinbeck’s work covering the plight of migrant farm workers and agitating for federal resettlement agencies inspired his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. In the letter, Steinbeck reflects on migrant workers’ efforts to share information about their rights and the ways that landowners and local law enforcement terrorized them and labeled their pamphlets “subversive literature.” Steinbeck declared that to him, “these are wonderful documents” because they show that “America will not always be in the hands of…men and groups who now dominate it with money with publicity and much terror.” Steinbeck’s sympathetic depiction of farmworkers infuriated some agribusiness leaders and landowners, who pushed to ban the book in parts of California. 

Teach with this item from Unit 1 of the curriculum guide, Reading Dangerously: Censorship and the Freedom to Read in 20th Century America.
 

Transcript:

All this occurred a few years ago. That it still happens and can happen, the evidence brought to light by the La Follette Committee, makes horribly clear. 

To get back– a few years ago the migrant people in California, faced with starvation and continually lowered wages, felt the usual American urge to group themselves in self defense. 

Attempts to form open labor unions were crushed by employers associations backed by county law enforcement officers. Any meeting of workers was raided by armed vigilantes on the ground that the migrants were reds. Any man known to have spoken in favor of organized labor was blacklisted, driven, jailed, beaten, and starved.

It was impossible for their people even to learn the laws of the country. Then there came into being secret groups, small but interrelated. Then men met stealthily in darkened tents and afterward crept away into the darkness. There the laws were discussed and the men were describing the laws. And in these groups, nickles and dimes were collected. Union printers were contacted – and the enclosed slips were issued and distributed – they came secretly through the state, a few in a jalopy, a few in a ditch bank camp. Men carried them folded in their pockets and showed them to the other men, and the women read them. One bulletin might be read by a hundred people. And all of this plotting and secrecy was necessary so that the people could know the laws. In some counties men were arrested for possessing these slips and the papers called them “subversive literature.” 

To me, these are wonderful documents. The dimes given by hungry men so that their own people might know the laws are a proof that America will not always be in the hands of those subversive men and groups who now dominate it with money with publicity and much terror. 

John Steinbeck

February 25, 1939,

Los Gatos 

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