The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath

When the migrant farmworkers sought refuge in California, they settled in ramshackle squatters’ settlements that were colloquially known as “Little Oklahomas” and “Hoovervilles.” “Hooverville” was a reference to President Herbert Hoover, whose presidency was tarnished by the onset of the Great Depression. Hoover became a US president only months before the stock market crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression in the 1930s. The Great Depression devastated the US economy and left millions of people without jobs. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, farmers in the Plains States of the Midwest and the South had over-tilled and over-farmed the land out of a demand to produce more crops to sell, and this practice eroded the top soil from the grasses below. When a severe drought hit the Great Plains area in the 1930s, the soil blew away, creating dust storms—better known as the “Dust Bowl”—and leaving the farmers without their lands or a source of income. These largely white migrants sought refuge in California, where they could use their skills as farmers to plow the land in the state’s expanding agricultural sector.

Both Steinbeck and Collins were liberal proponents of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program in the 1930s. This was a sweeping public works program that promised to create jobs and a social safety net and to spur economic growth during the Great Depression.

Steinbeck read Collins’s reports on the migrant camps, which included anecdotes about the “Okies”—a blanket term applied to the largely white migrants from the Midwest—and their culture. The descriptions of the Okies’ hardships and poverty in these reports directly inspired The Grapes of Wrath. 

Although Steinbeck fashioned himself a New Deal liberal, he predominantly encouraged that communities be given the means to improve their own standard of well-being. In other words, Steinbeck promoted self-help. He was trying to appeal to people who merely thought of migrants as a drain on resources by assuring them that their investment would be returned as the migrants quickly became self-sufficient. He also thought that migrants would benefit not from heavy policing but from self-governance, which would give them a sense of pride and community and put them on the path to becoming farm owners.