ONE OF THE BEST FRIENDS FARMWORKERS EVER HAD

ONE OF THE BEST FRIENDS FARMWORKERS EVER HAD
By Dick Meister

In assessing author John Steinbeck's writing, we shouldn't forget that few
people inside or outside the labor movement have done more for America's
perpetually oppressed farmworkers.

Steinbeck played a vital role in the long history of attempts to bring a
decent life to them that were begun by radical union organizers early in the
20th century and that the United Farm Workers has continued to this day.

He stirred up the country to an extent unmatched until the coming of the UFW
in the 1960s with its boycotts and other broadly-supported actions led by
Cesar Chavez.

"The Grapes of Wrath," Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1939, had
the greatest impact. The dramatic, plainly written, stunningly realistic
epic of migrants who left their drought-stricken farms in Oklahoma and other
southern and southwestern states to seek work on California's
corporate-controlled farms was a run-away best seller. As successful,
popular -- and realistic -- was the film version staring Henry Fonda.

Growers and their allies in politics and law enforcement denounced Steinbeck
as a liar and worse, threatened him with physical harm and had the book
banned and burned in several farm communities.

The book's opponents feared, more than anything else, that it would inspire
support for granting farmworkers the right of unionization.

Much of Steinbeck's earlier work -- short stories and journalism as well as
novels -- also effectively exposed the the workers' plight. That included
the violent suppression of the several strikes they waged in the early and
mid-1930s to demand union rights.

Public concern over their treatment reached a peak after the San Joaquin
Valley was hit by a disastrous flood in 1938. Steinbeck and others told the
country of thousands of homeless and starving families and of local
officials and growers who fought to keep federal agencies from bringing in
food and medical supplies for them, lest it decrease their willingness to
take jobs no matter how bad the pay and conditions.

In one of a series of widely-circulated articles for The San Francisco News,
Steinbeck reported that "the workers are herded about like animals. Every
possible method is used to make them feel inferior and insecure. At the
slightest possible suspicion that the men are organizing they are run from
the ranch at the point of guns. The large ranch owners know that if
organization is ever effected there will be the expense of toilets, showers,
decent living conditions and a raise in wages."

The articles and others in The Nation magazine and elsewhere led screen
actress (and later Congresswoman) Helen Gahagan Douglas to form The John
Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization. But grower allies in
the State Legislature blocked the committee's attempts to get collective
bargaining rights for farmworkers.

There were hopes, however, that heightened public pressure would bring
farmworkers under the federal law that had granted union rights to
industrial workers a few years earlier. A U.S. Senate chaired by Wisconsin
Progressive Robert La Follette Jr. concluded, after a series of
highly-publicized hearings in California Inspired in large part by the
writings of Steinbeck, that the federal act should be extended to
agriculture.

But by the time the recommendation was formally issued in 1942, World War II
was on. Most of the migrant farmworkers were in military service or working
in relatively high-paying war plants, and growers were demanding low-paid
replacements as essential to the war effort. They got them through
the federal bracero program that provided an unlimited supply of temporary
workers from Mexico who were at least as poorly treated as had been the U.S.
migrants. Their easy availability raised a barrier to farm unionization that
was breached by the UFW only after the program was ended in 1964.

Steinbeck also went on to other concerns after the war broke out. But he had
provided invaluable aid to a key group of Americans who desperately needed
it and had inspired and helped lay down guidelines for those who followed
him.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	2614
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	Bakersfield CA USA
Year:	1939
Person:	John Steinbeck