![]() ![]() ![]() “HIs spirit and decency,” Steinbeck wrote, “and his sense of his own dignity have not yet been quite wiped out.” Steinbeck witnessed one man crafting a toilet one day for his family using what he could find. Racism was as bright as the California sun. The farm owners and government were turning blind eyes to the exploited. The spectre of death sat with them at every meager meal. The families living in the camps were blearied and beaten down. The migrant farmworker was “that shifting group of nomadic, poverty-stricken harvesters driving by hunger and the threat of hunger from camp to camp, from harvest to harvest.” The camps were one of squalid destitution: cardboard shacks near irrigation ditches, or worse. With each article Steinbeck’s clarity on this fact grew more sharply defined. Related: 10 Books by Iconic Authors That You Might Have Missed ![]() “The new migrants.,” John Steinbeck wrote on assignment for the San Francisco News, “are here to stay.They can be citizens of the highest type, or they can be an army driven by suffering and hatred to take what they need.” Steinbeck continues: “On their future treatment will depend which course they will be forced to take.” The year was 1936 and Steinbeck was on commission to write what would become known as The Harvest Gypsies, a series of articles about California’s desperate migrant farmworker situation during the height of the Great Depression. ![]()
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