In 1936 the San Francisco News hired John Steinbeck to write a series of articles on Dust Bowl migrants in California. Steinbeck toured farm sites and shantytowns, and his work on these articles formed the basis of his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. The following selection is from the second installment of his newspaper series.
This is a family of six; a man, his wife, and four children. They live in a tent the color of the ground. Rot has set in on the canvas so that the flaps and the sides hang in tatters and are held together with bits of rusty baling wire. There is one bed in the family and that is a big tick [sack mattress] lying on the ground inside the tent.
They have one quilt and a piece of canvas for bedding. The sleeping arrangement is clever. Mother and father lie down together and two children lie between them. Then, heading the other way, the other two children lie, the littler ones. If the mother and father sleep with their legs spread wide, there is room for the legs of the children.
There is more filth here. The tent is full of flies clinging to the apple box that is the dinner table, buzzing about the foul clothes of the children, particularly the baby, who has not been bathed nor cleaned for several days. This family has been on the road longer than the builder of the paper house. There is no toilet here, but there is a clump of willows nearby where human feces lie exposed to the flies—the same flies that are in the tent.
Two weeks ago there was another child, a four year old boy. For a few weeks they had noticed that he was kind of lackadaisical, that his eyes had been feverish. They had given him the best place in the bed, between father and mother. But one night he went into convulsions and died, and the next morning the coroner’s wagon took him away. It was one step down.
They know pretty well that it was a diet of fresh fruit, beans, and little else that caused his death. He had no milk for months. With this death there came a change of mind in his family. The father and mother now feel that paralyzed dullness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain.
And this father will not be able to make a maximum of four hundred dollars a year any more because he is no longer alert; he isn’t quick at piece-work, and he is not able to fight clear of the dullness that has settled on him. His spirit is losing caste rapidly.
The dullness shows in the faces of this family, and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn. Sometimes they still start the older children off to school, but the ragged little things will not go; they hide in ditches or wander off by themselves until it is time to go back to the tent, because they are scorned in the school.
The better-dressed children shout and jeer, the teachers are quite often impatient with these additions to their duties, and the parents of the “nice” children do not want to have disease carriers in the schools.
The father of this family once had a little grocery store and his family lived in back of it so that even the children could wait on the counter. When the drought set in there was no trade for the store any more.
This is the middle class of the squatters’ camp. In a few months this family will slip down to the lower class. Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned to sullen anger before it dies.
Source: John Steinbeck, “The Harvest Gypsies,” San Francisco News, October 7, 1936.