Photo credit: Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley

California was paradise regained

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published in mid-April 1939, told the story of an impoverished family — the Joads — who leave Oklahoma and come to California. Furor raised by Steinbeck’s novel is comparable to that erupting with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. No public death warrant was issued for Steinbeck. He did, at times, fear for his life.

For the historian, the present appears as the future which surprises the past. — Ivan Blich, 1988

I’m trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong. — John Steinbeck, in a letter written while working on The Grapes of Wrath, 1938

From the last days of the Gold Rush, migrant labor — “fruit tramps” — harvested California’s crops. Until the 1930s, that labor was typically foreign-born or white, single, American males. Migrants appeared for harvest, and, after bringing in the last sheaf, they seemingly disappeared. To the nonmigrant and resident Californian, these migrants (“Mex,” “Jap,” “Chink,” “coolie,” or “bindlestiff,” ) must have been experienced — felt — as part of Nature itself, stunted stooping creatures, less than human, propelled by instinct and weather from the Imperial to the Sacramento valleys, up and down the 600 miles, picking lettuce and peas and ‘cots and filberts and cotton.

“Tractored out,” blown out, sold out, after the ’29 Crash, entire families quit the Southwest. On Route 66, they headed across New Mexico and Arizona to the United States’ last frontier, last hope (Alaska was a territory, the moon still green cheese). The Southwest was Paradise Lost. California was Paradise Regained, an alter- Eden. From rutted, dustblown land outside Tulsa, Little Rock, and Topeka, California appeared epic and opulent : orange groves, vineyards, an eternal now of seasonless calm. Just to dig your heels into El Centro, into Bakersfield soil could change your life, turn your luck.

Between 1935 and 1938, some 300,000 to 500,000 tenant farmers, sharecroppers, small businessmen from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas — no one ever knew the exact count — sold what they could, packed what was left (family Bible, photographs, pots and pans, mattress ticks) onto creaking Fords and La Salles and mutant welds of cars of various makers, and headed west. They stopped at Highway 66’s western terminus, got out, and kissed California soil. There was nothing to go back to. These men and women meant to stay.

The arrival of the “interstate” migrant, his gaunt, sad-eyed wife, their tow-headed children in stairsteps on either side, panicked the settled Californians. To Golden Staters who’d put down even shallow roots, who’d had time to make good, the new migrants’ presence hinted that all wasn’t well. California’s “haves,” saw in these most recent immigrants (as we who have roofs see in the roofless) what might still happen to them.

Californians dubbed the migrant “Okie,” a name that carried the same insult as “nigger,” “kike,” “wop.” (Says a character in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: “Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it … means you’re scum.”)

Unlike the foreign-born migrant, the Okie couldn’t be deported. Various gambits were tried to stave the invasion. Migrants were turned back at California borders. (The majority of Okie migrants entered the state through the Imperial Valley, then worked their way north.) Attempts were made to keep Okies from receiving relief payments. Once in the state, when harvest ended, migrants might be evicted from campgrounds by harsh armed force or seemingly benevolent gasoline “donations.” Often, local law enforcement harried the migrants, hoping they’d move on to become another county’s burden.

The years 1933 and 1934 had been times of strife between growers and labor, with massive strikes among Mexican laborers in cotton and fruit harvests. With the Okie influx two years later, growers’ fears of strikes increased. They reasoned that if the Mexican wasn’t satisfied with field wages, the white Okie sure as hell wouldn’t be.

The older Californians regarded the Okies as “hillbillies,” “inbred, low-grade stock,” naturally dirty, ignorant, immoral, and superstitious, accustomed to living “like trash.” They feared Okies would spread disease — tuberculosis, smallpox, and venereal. Signs in some California movie houses directed Okies to balcony “colored” sections. At school, children taunted Okie students for their ragged clothes, bare feet, untutored rural speech. (Again, from The Grapes of Wrath, one Okie to another about California: “Purtiest goddam country you ever seen, but they ain’t nice to you, them folks. They’re so scairt an’ worried they ain’t even nice to each other.”)

The rest of the U.S., weighted by Depression losses and troubled by prospects of a second world-wide war, remained unaware of our apathetic toward migrant problems in California. Only the Left-liberal The Nation and even smaller progressive, leftist national magazines and newspapers wrote about the migrants’ plight.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, published in mid-April 1939, told the story of an impoverished family — the Joads — who leave Oklahoma and come to California. Public furor raised by Steinbeck’s novel is comparable to that erupting with the recent publication of The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie. While no public death warrant was issued for Steinbeck, he did, at times, fear for his life.

The poverty and suffering of migrant Okies were brought to national attention. At the same time as The Grapes of Wrath, in April of 1939, Fortune devoted 20 pages to grim black-and-white photographs and whimsical delicate watercolors of migrants and migrant camps. Two months later, Life magazine illustrated sections of Steinbeck’s novels with photographs of Okie migrants. And in the fall of 1939, six months after The Grapes of Wrath emerged, California resident Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field was published.

McWilliams was a Nation contributor, a liberal — some would say a radical — Democrat, a lawyer and journalist. In January 1939, when Culbert Olson, California’s first Democratic governor in 50 years was inaugurated, McWilliams had been named commissioner of the state’s Division of Immigration and Housing.

McWilliams’s book essentially told the same story as Steinbeck’s novel. Nationally, Factories in the Field received scant notice except among leftist and progressive book buyers. In California, the book was as ferociously attacked as Steinbeck’s. The state’s big farmers described McWilliams as the “state’s number-one agricultural pest, outranking pear blight and boll weevil.”

Factories in the Field concluded that the condition of California’s migrant workers was a consequence of the type of agricultural land-ownership in California, in which vast acreages were controlled by absentee owners, by banks and by corporations. The Okie influx, McWilliams wrote, was only one small visible part of a pattern of exploitation that began shortly after the Gold Rush ended. It was an unpopular reading of history.

In the midst of societal dislocation – now, for instance, “homelessness’ or “drug wars” – the dislocation is experienced as discontinuous, striking from outside historical time, almost as an act of God. From the vantage of what in 1930 was the future and now is our present we can see: In California it had to happen this way.

Nonwriters tend to think that the muse, garbed in gauzy white and crowned in laurel, visits writers of fiction. That’s rarely so. What Steinbeck saw, what he heard, that’s what went into The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck said: “It’s just a book, interesting, I hope, instructive in the same way the writing instructed me.” Looking back, with help from McWilliams’s Factories of the Field, one can see how it was the fictional Joads came to suffer in California.

1542 — Spanish subject Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sails into San Diego Harbor. In the early 16th Century, when the first European’s – Spaniards – arrive in what now is California, a relatively sparse hunter-gatherer Indian population inhabits the land.

1769 — First permanent Spanish colony established in California in San Diego. By the late 18th Century, Spain, with Franciscans as Spain’s point men, have established 21 missions, ranging from Sonoma to San Diego.

1821 — Mexico gains independence from Spain.

1822 — California becomes province of Mexico.

1833 — Mexico, seeking control over California, secularizes missions by selling mission landholdings to private individuals. Many large private estates are thus established.

1840s — Several hundred U.S. citizens move into California, begin to farm, hunt, and trade.

May 1846 — U.S. enters into war with Mexico. Two months later, U.S. flag raised over Monterey in Northern California.

January 24, 1848 — Gold found at South Fork of American River. News of discovery spreads rapidly. Gold Rush lures thousands from Middle West and East Coast.

February 2, 1848 — Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially cedes California to U.S.

1848 to 1850 — California’s white population more than triples to 93,000.

1850 — California admitted to Union as nonslavery state.

1852 — Gold production peaks, begins rapid decline. Mining ceases to be poor man’s game. Many who arrived as gold prospectors during past decade now wish to settle. Land ownership, however, is concentrated in the hands of U.S. investors (who bought land, often at scandalously low prices, from its Mexican owners) and the railroads.

1860 — California population: 380,000. Agriculture grows in importance as wheat land is developed in Central Valley. State population remains scant and labor, scarce. (Workers in wheat fields are principally “hoboes.”) Mechanized production methods are introduced. Orchards and viticulture flourish north of San Francisco. Railroad construction begins. Thirty thousand Chinese laborers are brought to California to build railroad.

1869 — Last rail laid on transcontinental railroad, linking Sacramento with nation. Four Californians, owners of Southern Pacific Company, now exact powerful influence over California’s economy and political life. And at least 10,000 Chinese are immediately jobless, become agricultural workers.

In Central Valley, major crop becomes wheat, shipped by rail to port and thence overseas. Chinese go to work in orchards and vegetable fields.

1870 — California population: 560,000. One-five hundredth of California’s population owns more than half of state’s available agricultural land. Railroads own 20 million acres. Journalist Henry George: “California is not a country of farms but a country of plantations and estates.”

1875 — Nurseryman Luther Burbank settles near Santa Rosa, begins to develop seed stock and experiment with fruit tree grafting. Burbank will develop fruits and vegetables that survive cross-country journeys. Economic downturns in the 1870s lead to high unemployment. White settlers grow increasingly bitter toward Chinese, who having no choice, are willing to work for low (“coolie”) wages.

1880 — Karl Marx writes to a friend in U.S.: “I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.”

During this decade, wheat’s profitability declines. Growers irrigate wheat acreage, turn land over to hops, truck and orchard crops. Irrigation increases grower’s capital costs. To finance irrigation projects, growers turn to banks, and banks, in turn, expand control over state agriculture. With irrigation, yield per acre increases. Land prices rise.

Use of mechanical farm machinery increases. Even with a continuing increase of mechanization, California crops demand intensive hand labor at peak periods, workers who can swoop down, plant, weed, thin, or pick for a few days or weeks and move on. Thus begins the U.S.’s first modern migrant agricultural labor force.

California’s economy improves. Southern California, especially Los Angeles area, begins tumultuous expansion. By late 1880s, citrus groves will be producing large quantities of fruit.

1882 — Federal government enacts law prohibiting further Chinese immigration. Growers turn to Japan, southern Europe, India. When U.S. immigration restrictions cut numbers from these areas, growers hire workers from the Philippines and Mexico.

1886 — First full trainload of deciduous fruit shipped from California to East Coast. State is on the brink of becoming major supplier of winter fruits and vegetables to the entire nation.

1889 — Claus Spreckles builds his first California sugar beet factory, near Watsonville. Over next two decades, acreage devoted to sugar beet will increase, and with that increase, value of land again skyrockets.

1890 — California population: 1, 213,000. Factories for sugar beet production and acreage planted in sugar beets multiply.

1900 — California population: 1, 485,000. Lacking sufficient labor, state growers, through advertisement and offers of reduced railroad fares, begin to recruit harvest labor from other states. Advertisements distort realities of pay and conditions. No housing is provided; workers are encouraged to leave the state when harvests are over.

Number of Japanese farm workers increases. In 1890, 2039 Japanese were resident in California; by 1900, 24,000. They work primarily in hops, sugar beets, and berry crops. On their own, Japanese laborers lease previously unplanted “waste” land, begin state’s first rice cultivation. During this decade, Japanese become highest-paid and best organized farm-labor group in California for harvests.

1904 — California fruit growers print 100,000 copies of a pamphlet: “Grasp This, Your Opportunity.” The pamphlet is distributed across the U.S. and 9300 workers respond to the invitation, arrive in California for harvests.

1910 — California population: 2, 378,000. Of that number, approximately 72,000 are Japanese, 72,000 are Chinese.

Irrigation and mechanization make even more intensive farming possible. With this further intensification comes another expansion in farm size and tighter concentration of land ownership. In the other 47 states, the word “farmer” brings to mind a man in hobnailed boots and overalls who, with a few hired hands and his family, tills his own acres, milks his own cows. In California, “farmers” tend more often to be men in suits with offices in cities, who “farm” through managers -- and even managers are now likely to live in town. California farming has become industry; fields a factory floor.

An annual migratory circuit, as charitable as the circuit of migratory birds, has come into existence. The migrant labor starts in the south in the Imperial Valley, with lettuce, cabbage, peas, and melons, then heads north, following crops to the Sacramento Valley fruit harvests – walnuts, prunes, peaches. After late harvests of hops, grapes, deciduous fruits, the migrant turns and heads south to pick up work at pruning, thinning, and hoeing. Another group will go to truck crops and cotton in Arizona or to Washington state for apples and pears. Not many migrants make the full circuit. If the can find work in the big valleys – Imperial, San Joaquin, Sacramento – they stay until work gives out. Perhaps one-fifth of migrant laborers each year travel the 600 miles from the Imperial Valley to the Sacramento. In winter, migrants are unemployed. Many go to L.A. and San Francisco, hire out as casual laborers, subsist on handouts, starve.

During this decade, sporadic attempts are made to organize farm workers’ unions. Given seasonal nature of farm work, mobility of workers, and grower resistance, unions gain little strength among workers, win few concessions.

California growers begin to import Mexicans into state. During next two decades Mexico will increasingly supply bulk of migrant forces. In Southern California sugar beet fields, four-fifths of workers now come from Mexico. Unlike Anglo workers, Mexicans who become involved in strike activities or find themselves without work can easily be deported.

1913 — Los Angeles Aqueduct from Owens Valley completed. Alien Land Act enacted, prevents non U.S. citizens from owning California land, thus forcing Japanese to sell acreages they have developed.

August 3, 1913 — Wheatland (California) Riot – 2800 men, women and children have responded to Arizona and California newspaper advertisements asking for workers to come to hop ranch harvest. (A state inquiry will later determine that ranch owner knew he could supply work for only 1500 and deliberately advertised for more workers than needed so as to keep wages low.) No housing is provided, only nine outdoor toilets. Temperatures rise to 105 degrees by noon. Ranch makes no provisions to carry water to fields. Wages rise and fall in relation to number of workers on hand. On August 3, IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) union organizers call mass meeting, draw 2000. Sheriff and deputies enter field where meeting is in progress. Riot follows. Local district attorney, a deputy sheriff, two workers killed, many injured. Governor sends four National Guard companies to ranch. Guard surrounds camp, helps local law enforcement arrest workers. In weeks that follow, several hundred IWW members in California are arrested, beaten, held incommunicado in county jails. Two IWW members are later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. (Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field.)

1914 — California’s economy benefits from opening of Panama Canal and from factories established to meet requirements of U.S. effort in World War I. State agriculture again expands, and with U.S. citizens increasingly employed by war industries, Mexico becomes principal supplier of farm labor for California’s large growers. According to the California Commission on Immigration and Housing report, the 75,000 migrants in the state work on ranches “devoid of the accommodations given to horses.” One-fourth of these 75,000 are physically ill.

1920 — California population: 3, 427,000. Year is referred to as year of the “Mexican harvest”; more than 50 percent of California’s farm labor this year is Mexican.

Cotton production in San Joaquin Valley develops swiftly during next decade. As cotton acreage expands, more Mexican labor is imported. Because cotton picking demands experienced pickers, California growers begin to advertise for cotton field workers from Texas and Oklahoma.

Beginning in the '20s, large growers hire migrants through farm labor employment agencies. “Employment through a central agency minimizes the expense of recruiting labor; it enhances the bargaining power of the growers at the expense of the workers; it divorces the individual grower from … responsibility for the workers; it creates an ever-increasing army of surplus laborers; it speeds up the flow of labor to the fields and quickens the movement of migratory workers out of the farm counties at the end of the season. (McWilliams, Factories in the Field.)

1924 — Federal law severely restricts immigration, thus cutting off supply of workers from Europe and Asia.

January 24, 1924 — First statewide meeting of large growers called to discuss farm labor. Growers work out estimates of total migratory workers required for a given season. Fix wage rates.

1929 — In California, fruit and vegetable truck crops have increased from 6.6 percent of total crop values in 1869 to 78.4 percent in this year.

October 19, 1929 — Black Friday. Stock market collapse heralds high unemployment, failing businesses and banks, falling agricultural prices.

One- third of all U.S. large-scale farms (annual crop value of 30,000) are in California. In California less than one-tenth of the farms produce more than one-half of the crops, while small farmers (41.4 percent) produce only 6 percent. Percentage of paid farm laborers in U.S. is 26 percent; in California, paid farm laborers make up 57 percent of all persons employed in agriculture.

During the last decade, state farm production has increased 13 percent; farm wages have declined 4 percent. Industrial character of California agriculture now firmly established. Farm industry is organized from top to bottom: methods of operation have been thoroughly rationalized; control tends more and more to be vested in the hands of larger growers; and dominance of financial centers is greater than ever. California farms begin to witness end of new alien racial groups as white workers begin to enter farmwork in greater numbers. (McWilliams, Factories in the Field)

1930 — California population: 5, 677,000. Effects of Depression cut into California. Wages fall to all-time lows. State’s unemployment exacerbated by Okie influx. Before Okies arrived, migrant labor force was 200,000. At peak of California harvests – from July through October – only 175,000 farm workers are needed and state already has sufficient Filipino and Mexican farm workers. Plus, unemployed urban Californians seek farm work. Now, except during harvest peak, there are two to three migrant laborers for every job.

Some one-third of migrant families (average family size is counted as four) have annual incomes of $200. Overall, average income per migrant family is estimated at $300 to $450 per year, less than half what California Relief Administration estimates as necessary for subsistence.

In fields and packing sheds, grower-farm worker disputes increase in number and intensity. Between 1930 and 1932, some 50 agricultural strikes erupt. Most strikes are spontaneous, without union backing, and are swiftly quelled by local law enforcement (aided by deputized farmers and townspeople), working with growers.

1932 — Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union organizes California farm laborers, gains small rise in wages for some. But with labor supply greater than demand, and with growers’ organizations, aided by law enforcement and vigilantes, determined to quash unions, farm workers win few concessions, many bloody heads. In this year, vigilante activity against strikers and organizers becomes brutal and direct..

1933 — U.S., 16 million unemployed. 250,000 migrant farm laborers in California. In 1932 farm-labor agents advertised for hands at 15 cents an hour, in 1933 wages fall to 12 ½ cents.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated as 32nd president. To alleviate Depression’s effects, Roosevelt initiates New Deal, to boost business and provide jobs.

1934 — In California, as “red scare” sweeps state, vigilante groups organize in preparation for farm labor strikes.

May 7, 1934 — Associated Farmers hold first statewide convention. “They agree to cooperate to harvest crops in case of strikes and to offer their services to the local sheriff as special deputies in the event of disorders arising out of picketing and sabotage.” (McWilliams, Factories in the Field)

June 1934 — At Balfour-Guthrie ranch near Brentwood, Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union leads apricot pickers’ strike. Sheriff’s deputies herd 200 strikers into cattle pen, arrest leaders, convoy remainder out of the county. In trials that follow, CAWIU president, secretary, and six associates are convicted of treason under criminal-syndicalism law.

At the end of 1934, Commission of Immigration and Housing estimates that 50 percent of the state’s migrant population is now native white American, with one-third Mexican and the balance made up of Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese.

1935 — In January Steinbeck finishes his novel In Dubious Battle, a tale of union organizers and growers battling in California. He writes to a friend: “The book is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing.”

Summer 1935 — First federally supported migrant labor camp opens near Maryville.

September 1935 — Los Angeles Committee on Indigent Alien Transients created, headed by L.A.’s chief of police. One hundred twenty-five L.A. police, in counties far from L.A., patrol points of entry into California, stop all cars that look as though they might contain “unemployables,” and turn them back.

December 30, 1935 — As winter harvest season opens, possibility looms of strike among lettuce workers. Imperial Valley sheriff launches roundup of farm labor organizers. Los Angeles Times notes: “Professional agitators who are busily engaged in fomenting new labor trouble in the Imperial Valley winter lettuce will find authorities ready for them. Sheriff Ware and his deputies have the jump on them this time.”

August 1936 — Steinbeck completes second draft of what will become Of Mice and Men. (His dog ate the first draft.) Steinbeck has been asked to write an article on migrant labor for The Nation and for San Francisco News. In San Francisco, he visits federal Resettlement Administration Region IX offices, collects background material and statistics for his articles.

During the next year Steinbeck visits ditchbank settlements, squatters’ and federal migrant labor camps. At the federal Arvin migrant camp, Steinbeck meets camp manager Tom Collins. The author talks campers, attends a camp council meeting, a dance. From Collins, Steinbeck acquires weekly reports the manager writes for his superiors in San Francisco. (In Factories of the Field also uses Collins’s reports.)

Home from the trip, Steinbeck writes, to his agent, “I discovered a book like nothing in the world.”

September 1936 — Salinas lettuce packers strike. All male Salinas residents, aged 18 to 45, are ordered mobilized. Twenty-five hundred of these “volunteers” protect strikebreakers brought in from other area, ensure that lettuce gets from fields to packinghouse and onto trains headed east. Strike is crushed.

1937 — Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated for his second term as president. His inaugural address notes: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished … The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

February 1938 — Steinbeck writes to his agent that he plans a trip through California: “There are about five thousand families starving to death … The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them with the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line … I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can’t do something to help knock these murderers on the heads. Do you know what they’re afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities, they will organize and that is the bug bear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer …when I have finished my job the jolly old associated farmers will be after my scalp again.”

September 1938 – Steinbeck writes to his agent: “We have a title at last.” Steinbeck’s wife Carol has chosen The Grapes of Wrath from a line in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” In October, Steinbeck writes to his agent that The Grapes of Wrath is ready for revision. He warns that the book may not be popular, advises against a large first edition. Finished, Steinbeck writes:

• to Carol
• who willed this book
• to Tom
• who lived it

“Tom” is not — as many readers subsequently came to believe — Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, but Tom Collins, the migrant camp manager.

As 1939 opens, Steinbeck, his agent, and Viking Press “dicker” over the novel’s “language.” Steinbeck holds firm. “This book wasn’t written for delicate ladies. If they read it at all, they’re messing in something not their business … Those readers who are insulted by normal events or language mean nothing to me.”

By mid-April, reviews began to emerge. The New Yorker’s Clifton Fadiman writes: “… this book may just possibly do for our time what Les Miserables did for its, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for its … Let’s try to keep in mind what The Grapes of Wrath is about: to wit, the slow murder of a half a million innocent and worthy American citizens.” The Saturday Review of Literature: “… by no means perfect, but possibly its faults … are a measure of its worth, in that it triumphantly lives them down.”

Newsweek’s Burton Rascoe didn’t like it: “The book has beautiful, even magnificent, passages in it; but it is not well organized. I can’t quite see what the book is about, except that there are ‘no frontiers left and no place to go.’ Time liked it better: “… Steinbeck’s longest novel (619 pages) and more ambitious than all his others combined. The publishers believe it is ‘perhaps the greatest modern American novel, perhaps the greatest single creative work this country has ever produced.’ It is not. But it is Steinbeck’s best novel … It is ‘great’ in the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was great — because it is inspired propaganda.”

Several days after reading his initial reviews, Steinbeck wrote to his agent: “Fortunately, I’m not writing for reviewers.” The next day, he wrote again: “The telegrams and telephones — all day long — speak … speak … speak, like hungry birds … The telephone is a thing of horror. And the demands for money — scholarships, memorial prizes. One man wants 47,000 dollars to buy a newspaper …”

By the end of April, The Grapes of Wrath, selling 2500 copies per day, made its first appearance on Publishers Weekly’s list of national best-sellers, In May it moved to the top of national lists.

On May 8, the Oklahoma City Times vociferated against the book: “Any reader who has his roots planted in the red soil will boil with indignation over the bedraggled, bestial characters that will give the ignorant east convincing confirmation of the people of the southwest. If you have children, I’d advise against leaving the book around home. It has Tobacco Road looking as pure as Charlotte Bronte when it comes to obscene, vulgar, lewd stable language.”

By June, efforts had begun to keep The Grapes of Wrath from circulating in public libraries. Late that month, Steinbeck wrote to his agent: “The Associated Farmers have tried to make me retract things by very sly methods. Unfortunately for them the things are thoroughly documented … They can’t shoot me now because it would be too obvious … So I think I am personally safe enough except for automobile accidents, etc. …”

Late in June, the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her syndicated column, “My Day,” defended Steinbeck’s book: “Now I must tell you that I have just finished a book which is an unforgettable experience in reading. The Grapes of Wrath … both repels and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay down or even skip a page. Somewhere I saw the criticism that this book was anti-religious, but somehow I cannot imagine thinking of the love ‘that passeth all understanding.’ “ Mrs. Roosevelt concluded: “The book is course in spots, but life is course in spots, and the story is very beautiful in spots just as life is.”

In July, Steinbeck wrote, again, to his agent: “The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad.” He added: “I’m frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand – I mean a kind of hysteria about the book that is not healthy … Meanwhile the Associated Farmers keep up a steady stream of accusation that I am first a liar and second a communist. Their vilification has a quality of hysteria too.”

By August, the Kansas City Board of Education, noting that the book “portrays life in such a bestial way,” had ordered The Grapes of Wrath removed from public and school libraries. On August 22, the Los Angeles Times on its front page announced: "PRO-AMERICANS HEAR ‘SMEAR’ BOOK SCORED.” Beneath the headline, the Associated Press reported: “Speakers at a special Statewide meeting of Pro-America denounced recent books dealing with California’s migrant problem… called for a cessation of relief for transients … Attended by 500 persons, the banquet was announced as specifically for the purpose of refuting the pictures of migrant conditions as portrayed in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field.”

The next day, the New York Times reported that in Bakersfield, the Associated Farmers of Kern County, denouncing The Grapes of Wrath as “obscene sensationalism” and “propaganda in its vilest form,” had met to map a statewide ban on the book in schools and libraries. Later in the week the New York Times noted: “The nationwide publicity brought to a head by The Grapes of Wrath has brought the whole situation in California to a boiling point.” And on September 2, Collier’s magazine editorialized: “The Grapes of Wrath is propaganda for the idea that we ought to trade our system for the Russian system.”

In October, Steinbeck wrote to his agent: “The Grapes of Wrath dropped from the head of the list to second place out here and about time, too. It is far too far when Jack Benny mentions it in his program … In a month it will be off the list and in six months I’ll be forgotten.”

As the year ended, the novel continued to make news. In November the New York Times reported that the East St. Louis, Illinois library had ordered its three copies of The Grapes of Wrath burned.

In May 1940, soon after learning he had received the Pulitzer Prize fiction award for The Grapes of Wrath, a letter came to Steinbeck from an organization battling the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic propaganda sweeping the U.S. The letter’s writer had noted: “There is very widespread propaganda, particularly among extreme reactionary religionists, that you are Jewish and that The Grapes of Wrath is Jewish propaganda.” Steinbeck answered: “I cannot see how The Grapes of Wrath can be Jewish propaganda but then I have heard it called communist propaganda also. It happens that I am not Jewish … I find that I do not experience any pride that it is so.”

By 1942, the second world-wide war in 30 years began to require armaments and men. The families who had been models for Steinbeck’s Joads entered the armed services and factories producing war material. They soon blended into communities into which they’d moved. Steinbeck and his first wife were divorced. He married a second time, fathered two sons — John Steinbeck IV and Thom – and moved to the East Coast. He would never again live in his native state.