"Steinbeck and America's West" by Dr. David Wrobel, WHA Presidential Address

Hi, everyone. I'm Anne Hyde from the University of Oklahoma. I'm editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, and I want to welcome everyone to, not exactly Albuquerque, but to the 2020 Western History Association Presidential Address, and I'm going to be introducing my longtime friend, history department colleague, and now dean, in a reasonably brief way, and that's quite a challenge. So, doctor and professor and dean David Robel has done a lot, traveled far, and published a ton in the heart of our field as a scholar of the North American West, regionalism, American thought, culture, and literature, and the progressive era. I've known David since the early 1990s, for sure since an August PCB AHA meeting at San Francisco State 24 years ago, and we've been intellectual buddies since then. I wrote an essay for a book that he and Mike Steiner put together in 1997, and we've been sharing conference panels, bar seats, picnic benches, WHA committees, and now classrooms, tables and bars, library tables, and Zoom screens at OU. He's been writing letters of recommendation for me and me for him for two decades. Maybe it's the accent, but he really can convince people to take on and finish all kinds of tasks, including this introduction. After getting a BA in history and philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, David did his graduate work at Ohio University, where he got an MA in 1987 and a PhD in 1991. Then he had some jobs, small places like Hartwick College and the College of Worcester, doing time as a visitor. He ended up at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, and he got tenure there before he moved to UNLV, where he spent 11 years. Meanwhile, he published some books. His first book, The End of American Exceptionalism, Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal, came out in 1993, and three more monographs followed as David got interested in bigger ideas about a global West and how much the first half of the 20th century matted to West, nation, and world. He's got a host of edited collections, and he's brought many of his along in those volumes. His 2013 book, Global West, American Frontier, Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism, won the Western Heritage Award for Best Nonfiction Book, and his 2015 article, Considering Frontiers and Empires, won the WHA's Oscar Winther Award for the Best Article in the Western Historical Quarterly. David came to OU in 2011 to hold the Merrick Chair in Western History, but he was also awarded the David Bourne Professorship in 2016, recognizing truly exceptional contributions to the mission of a public university in outstanding teaching and research. Since 2017, he served as the College of Arts and Sciences at OU. He's also received numerous research fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, and more. Recently, he's been a visiting scholar at the National Steinbeck Center, working on his new book, which we're going to hear about tonight, and other organizations appreciate him, too. He's past president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA and of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society, and he's been a distinguished lecturer for the OAH since 2008. He's also been consistently involved in K-12 partnerships, supporting teachers at all levels, and he's won awards for his teaching everywhere, including the 2015 Holden Award for Teaching Excellence from OU's College of Arts and Science. As dean, he still teaches our giant introductory survey course for first-year students. David's wife, Dr. Janet Ward, also my friend and drinking pal, is also professor of history at OU, is also president of her scholarly society, and just became a vice president for research. I might wonder what they talk about at home, but I know it's about Leo the Golden Retriever, escapee extraordinaire, a new puppy, and three teenagers, Davy, Miranda, and Ethan, who are all quarantining carefully to take care of Janet's 93-year-old dad. So it isn't just accent. David feeds dogs, children, and graduate students on the sly, so they follow him around. He's also a competitive guy. He plays high-level competitive doubles tennis. He regularly hurts unsuspecting people at WHA meetings with friendly racquetball or tennis games. But knowing all this, I came to OU in 2016 when the WHA decided to move the Western Historical Quarterly from Utah State University, where it had been for 50 years. And that, of course, was all David, colluding with a few other people like Betsy Jamison and Al Hurtado to move the journal and convince OU to hire an editor and a faculty member, me. So now we share reading glasses and quite a few graduate students, often co-directing as I figured out what PhD students were, and as he figured out what Dean meant. It's been an honor and a pleasure seeing Professor David at his most intense and gentlest as we shepherd people into finishing and writing dissertations. We did six Zoom thesis defenses last spring, which was fine, but I missed the Robelle intensity operating in the room. And I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing some of that today. We're very proud of what those students end up doing, and it's been a great pleasure to do that work together. So even though I so, so wish I was saying this in person in Albuquerque, I really would like to welcome everyone to join me and 2020 President David Robelle in what I know will be an ambitious, intense and gentle talk, just like our president. Thank you. First, I'd like to thank the Western History Association, all of you for allowing me to service your president. This is one of the greatest honors of my professional career and of my life. I love this organization and what it represents and especially what it's become. It's growing diversity, it's inclusiveness, it's increasingly unhierarchical structure, and it's genuine friendliness. We're bound together in ways that most members of professional organizations are not, and we need to cherish those ties. Before I begin my main remarks, I'd like to offer some very sincere and heartfelt thanks. Anne Hyde, thank you for your kind and generous introduction, for being such a wonderfully considerate colleague and friend, for your superb editorship of the Western Historical Quarterly, and for your deep devotion to both the WHA and the AHA. The late Martin Ridge, WHA president from 1986 to 1987. Because of you, I came to the Huntington Library for the first time in 1990, and it became a home for me. You let me house sit during the summers in the 1990s, and you didn't need anyone to house sit. You did so much for me behind the scenes, but you never let me know you'd helped. You were too humble to take credit for all the good you did for so many people. Martin will be learning from you for a long, long time. Peter Blodgett, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History at the Huntington Library. My journey in the archives began in 1990 with your guidance, and you've been a brilliant guide ever since. For every book, your selfless service to and support for so many scholars of the West has been one of the field's greatest foundations. We're all in your debt. Elaine Nelson, you're an extraordinary executive director, and the guidance you provided me and that you provide the WHA every day cannot be complimented too enthusiastically or too often. Thank you for leading our organization, and thanks to the wonderful WHA staff team. Gingie Scharf, the energy, the passion, and the purpose that you've brought to your role as Chair of Local Arrangements has been truly exceptional. Your service to the WHA and to the field has been extraordinary. Thank you, and thanks to the Local Arrangements Committee that you've led. Amy Lone Tree, Laurie Flores, and Liesl Karchildas, Program Committee Co-Chairs, you are brilliant leaders. You've put together a program that lays the foundation for the WHA's next 60 years. Liesl, I'm grateful to have had the good fortune to work with you beginning at UNLV. Liesl, Laurie, Amy, I'm so fortunate for your guidance of our outstanding Program Committee in the construction of this year's wonderful program. Patty Limerick, you kindly hosted me at the Center of the American West in spring and summer 1999. That was a critical time in my career and life, and things turned in wonderful new directions in no small part because you took me to a Humanities Center event. My mother, Evelyn, I couldn't have come to America for grad school way back in 1985 without you taking out a bank loan to help me, and you supported me in so many other ways in the 35 years since I left home. From the council housing estate in Roehampton to the presidency of the WHA, you built the foundation and made the sacrifice that made it all possible. Thanks, Mom. Janet Ward, Bramah Presidential Professor of History, Founding Director of the OU Humanities Forum, President of the German Studies Association, and now Senior Associate Vice President for Research and Partnerships at OU, thank you for being at that Humanities Center event in Boulder in early 1999. Everything good in the last two decades of my life, personal and professional, has come as a result of our partnership. I've been fortunate in so many ways in my life, but most of all in finding you and making our life together. As you can see, I've had a great deal of help along the way, and I hope we can all continue to help each other as we begin the next 60 years of the Western History Association. In early 1938, while preparing to craft the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck explained, I'm trying to write history while it is happening, and I don't want to be wrong. Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, he reflected on the ancient commission of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and dredge up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. I've thought about these words in recent years as my attention has turned to Steinbeck's writing as a window onto the West and the nation in the middle third of the 20th century, the era from the New Deal to the Great Society, the second American age of progressive reform. I've considered my own scholarly work, shaped as it has been by my admiration for much of the progressive activism of the 1930s and the 1960s. I'm confident that few people think of me as an activist scholar. I've spent the last three decades writing about the West in American and global thought and culture, offering relatively gentle, moderately prescriptive, yet hardly manifesto-like exhortations of how understanding the Western past can help us navigate the difficulties and complexities of the present. Mine has been a sort of history as a rearview mirror approach, acknowledging that our field is not a predictive science, but that it can inform present thinking and policy by illuminating past actions, processes, and consequences. Patti Limerick kindly devoted time some years ago to expunging the perhapses and maybes from my work, the cautious qualifiers that have situated me squarely in the realm of moderation rather than that of bold assertion. She was not entirely successful. Now I'm insisting that John Steinbeck's words and works mattered in his lifetime and that they should matter now for people who care about the West and America more than a half century since his death. Those words matter in an era that encapsulates and exacerbates the fault lines that divide our nation in ways we've not seen since the 1930s and 60s. My sensibilities as a scholar of the West and of American thought and culture have helped me appreciate Steinbeck's positive and purposeful contributions to the regional and national past, as well as acknowledge his faults and failings and limits as a guide. Given my infamous, even inexplicable passion for the history of historical writing, I might have chosen to use Steinbeck's writings as a lens to illuminate the historiographical twists and turns in our field, from the frontier thesis and regionalism to global frameworks and settler colonialism. Instead, I'll highlight aspects of Steinbeck's life and work, mostly from 1935 to 1940, though briefly during the war years too, both in relation to the 2020 WHA conference theme of migrations, meeting grounds, and memory, and to the ancient commission of the writer that he talked about, both then and now. In the mid to late 30s, Steinbeck wrote a series of important works on migrant labor in California. During the war years, he worked as a government propagandist and as a war correspondent overseas. Steinbeck pervaded the American cultural landscape from the start of the Second New Deal to the end of World War II. During those 10 years, he published 11 books and seven films based on his writings were released. He was as well known and widely read as any American writer since Mark Twain, yet Steinbeck was hardly revered or even appreciated by the arbiters of the American literary canon. During his lifetime, critics dismissed his work as overly sentimental and not stylistically innovative. His literary reputation developed in inverse parallel to his popular acclaim. Americans read Steinbeck because he articulated the daily strivings of working people more effectively and authentically than any other writer of his generation. I'm drawn to his advocacy for migrant families in the Depression years who journeyed from my adoptive state of Oklahoma and the rest of the Southern Plains to California. I appreciate his understanding of the struggles for food, shelter, health, and dignity of those who labor with their hands. Perhaps my own backstory helps explain the affinity. I grew up in working-class government housing in London. There was a single small but full bookcase in the home and a paperback edition of Mice and Men was among its contents and that little book spoke to me with a directness that Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy could not match. Steinbeck's advocacy was imperfect, certainly less racially inclusive than that of his contemporary Kerry McWilliams. Nonetheless, it was heartfelt and genuine and on balance it served as a force for good and it still can. As a transplant from another country who sought to find home in various places across America for 35 years, I'm drawn to Steinbeck as a regionalist who understood the power of attachment to place. I value his highlighting the ugly truth of how even the most recently arrived Californians sometimes develop their own sense of belonging by dehumanizing even newer arrivals, a process of regionalism through reaction that lamentably remains alive and well across the Western America. I appreciate Steinbeck as a chronicler of place who celebrated the inherent decency and humanity of those on the fringes of society, the countercultural types, the sex workers, the developmentally challenged. I relish the irony of how his poison cream puff of a novel, as Malcolm Cowley described Cannery Row, helped create a tourist attraction from the rusted shells of old canning factories. I suggest that what became known as Steinbeck country, that part of central California from San Jose in the north down through Monterey County and bounded to the east by the Gabilan Mountains and even stretching further south and east to Kern County, can be re-envisioned as a metaphor for remembering progressive ideas and values in the present. Published in January 1936, Steinbeck's Indubious Battle was the earliest example of his determination to write history while it was happening. He began crafting the novel in September 1934, shortly after San Francisco's Bloody Thursday. He described the book as brutal, merely a recording of consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing. His story about strike organizing is almost entirely devoid of heroes. Steinbeck focused on the developing collective consciousness of the workers and their mistreatment by California agribusiness and the local vigilantes those interests mobilized. He also addressed the brutality of a methodically applied communist ideology that justified violent and inhumane means to secure its ends. He charted the anatomy of a strike in the apple orchards that was doomed to failure from the start. From the activities of the IWW in the Pacific Northwest to the longshoremen's and field workers' strikes in California, the contemporary context of Western American labor struggles pervades in Dubious Battle. But race and migration do not. Three quarters of the workers in the strikes the novel described were Mexican, but none of Steinbeck's characters were. We don't learn about the efforts of the Filipino labor union in the Salinas Valley in 1934, affiliated for just a single week in late August, the precise moment when Steinbeck, whose hometown was Salinas, began working on the book, affiliated with the mostly white Salinas Vegetable Packers Association. The mob violence directed against the FLA in September and the positive resolution of the strike that the FLA managed to achieve later that month received no mention in the novel. Nonetheless, in Dubious Battle was successful and in the wake of its success the San Francisco News invited Steinbeck to write a series of articles on the Oklahoma families, migrant families who were in California. And at this moment his life and work took a turn. His developing literary talents became more directly connected to a contemporary context and cause. Steinbeck met with federal resettlement administration officials who wanted him to promote the government's fledgling system of sanitary camps in the state. Steinbeck toured the migrant camps in the San Joaquin Valley and what he witnessed shocked him out of his developing literary stance as a neutral, non-teleological observer. Teleology is the study of final causes, the analysis of ultimate purpose or design as an explanation for natural phenomena or human behavior. Teleological approaches emphasize cause and effect relationships that lead to clear conclusions or resolutions. Steinbeck, by contrast, was trying to chart solely what is rather than passing judgment on what should be, could be or might be. He characterized in Dubious Battle as judging nothing and his popular 1937 novella of Mice and Men was originally to have been titled simply and non-prescriptively Something That Happened. But now Steinbeck was moved to anger, impassioned advocacy and judgment which surfaced in the seven articles for the news. The Harvest Gypsies articles appeared in early October 1936 accompanied by Dorothea Lange's photographs including one of Florence Owens Thompson from the famous Migrant Mother series. Steinbeck stressed the loss of dignity among migrant families as they became destitute and sick as a result of labor and living conditions. Placing particular emphasis on the inhumane lack of adequate public health services, he described the suffering of one Oklahoma couple whose six-year-old daughter was partially blind as a consequence of improperly treated measles and whose 15-year-old boy died of a burst appendix the day after the county hospital failed to provide proper treatment. He emphasized the stillborn babies, the infant deaths, because malnourished mothers were unable to breastfeed. Infant mortality in the San Joaquin Valley was two and a half times the national average. He emphasized the young children with swollen bellies dying from disease and malnutrition related illnesses. Steinbeck also highlighted the suffering mother's anguish and despair and the loss of dignity and spirit that he said cut fathers down to a kind of subhumanity. This account is still painful to read and it should be. Steinbeck called out the large agricultural banking and other corporate entities in the state including the Associated Farmers of California as the forces behind the acts of vigilantism and terrorism, the beatings, kidnappings, tar and featherings, and shootings employed against migrant labor. He blamed the large farming interests for imposing starvation wages and for exploiting migrant families with inadequate and overpriced temporary housing and company stores. Because of their actions he declared California democracy is rapidly dwindling away and fascistic methods are more numerous and more powerfully applied and more openly practiced in California than any other place in the United States. Steinbeck blamed organized private interests working hand in hand with state and county governments for the migrant families horrendous conditions. He highlighted the restoration of dignity through the resettlement administration's first two demonstration camps at Marysville and Arvin and he advocated for an expansion of the camp system. He offered a road map for migrant independence and family security through fair wages, small plots of land, and educational access. The cost he insisted would not be much greater than the amount which is now spent for tear gas, machine guns, and ammunition and deputy sheriffs. However, on matters of race Steinbeck's descriptions and prescriptions were less satisfying. He fully recognized that field labor in California had been performed previously by Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and Japanese. He emphasized the oppression and segregation they suffered. He reminded readers that the success of the Chinese and then the Japanese as agricultural producers had made them targets of violence and deportation and that Mexican laborers efforts to organize had been met with, he said, vigilante terrorism and savagery unbelievable in a civilized state and with systematic deportation. Steinbeck clearly understood and disavowed the racism and xenophobia that were the bedrock of California agriculture. However, Steinbeck also contrasted foreign migrants and the Dust Bowl refugees exhibiting in the process the racial blinders that accompanied his Jeffersonian agrarian myopia. These newest migrants, he said, had felt the pride of land ownership and had the terrible pain of seeing their lands wither and die. They made the crossing and have often seen the death of their children on the way. They were, he declared, the descendants of pioneers and were not migrants by nature. And he insisted that with this new race, the old methods of repression, starvation wages, of jailing, beating, and intimidation are not going to work because these are American people. For all his impassioned chronicling of the inhumane treatment of workers of color, Steinbeck's suggestion that the good white American pioneering stock of English, German, and Scandinavian descent had somehow suffered more or had more to lose because of a closer attachment to the land and were likely, less likely, to accept being treated as peons, the non-white foreign labor was inaccurate and racist. Nonetheless, Steinbeck was entirely accurate in predicting that it would be harder for California agribusiness to subject white Dust Bowl refugees to such inhumane conditions and get away with it. A majority white American population and its white political representatives would take notice and view the white on white oppression as un-American. Steinbeck's own efforts and those of others employed or encouraged by the federal government, including Lange, kept the white migrants in the public eye. Of course, Thompson, that unforgettable depression era face of white American poverty, strength, and determination in Lange's photograph was actually a Cherokee woman, though that would not be known to most people until more than four decades later. From early fall 1936 to late winter 1938, Steinbeck learned more about the conditions Southern Plains migrants' families faced. His guide was Tom Collins, the tireless and inspiring manager of the Arvin Sanitary Camp near Bakersfield. Collins' detailed reports on migrant culture informed Steinbeck's understanding of California's newest refugees. Steinbeck's travels to migrant squatter camps and employer-owned farm camps, as well as the FSA camps with Collins and others, including life photographer Horace Bristol, helped him appreciate the migrants' daily struggles for work, food, health, and safety. During 18 months of research on, immersion in, assistance to, and advocacy for Southern Plains families, Steinbeck, the New Deal Democrat, became an activist author. In February, Steinbeck wrote to a friend that there were 5,000 families starving to death in the interior valleys. Not just hungry, he said, but actually starving. He explained that the government was trying to provide food and medical assistance, but its efforts were being sabotaged by the utilities and banks and huge growers who he described as fascists and murderers. He made the trip to flooded Napomo and Basalia in late February and early March. His experience there helping the migrants proved another pivotal moment in his awakening, leading him to declare, I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this. This anger and frustration colored his article, Starvation Under the Orange Trees, which he concluded with a damning rhetorical question, if you buy a farm horse and only feed him when you work him, the horse will die. Is it possible that this state is so stupid, so vicious, and so greedy that it cannot feed and clothe the men and women who helped to make it the richest area in the world? At the end of May 1938, Steinbeck began the 100 days of writing over five months that produced The Grapes of Wrath. He kept a daily journal that's filled with an obsessive urgency, uncertainty, and occasional hope that he was creating a literary work to match the significance of the contemporary crisis he was chronicling. The challenge was to convey the full horrors of the migrants' plight while emphasizing their strength, dignity, and humanity in the face of desperate poverty and terrible misery. He needed to achieve all this while illuminating experience through a non-teleological lens, telling what is non-judgmentally. This is reflected again and again in the novel, in Jim Casey, the former preacher who no longer preaches but who, right up to the moment he's slain, gently implores people to act decently toward each other. In Tom Jode, a parolee who kills for the second time and then, as Casey reincarnated, becomes the living embodiment of humanity's best impulses towards the brutalized, hungry, and downtrodden. In Rose of Sharon, whose milk-laden breast gives life to a dying stranger after she delivers a stillborn baby, an ending Steinbeck steadfastly refused to alter significantly, insisting that the giving of the breast has no more sentiment than the giving of a piece of bread. However, Steinbeck's method did not make him a neutral observer of the events in California. His unequivocal support for labor was evident in his letters in John Barry's San Francisco News column, Ways of the World, that July. Barry had asked Steinbeck if he would participate in a non-partisan forum of labor and business representatives for the purpose of ending recent strikes. Steinbeck wrote, I'm afraid of that word non-partisan. He insisted that he was completely partisan, explaining that every effort I can bring to bear is and has been at the call of the common working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, wear what they weave, use what they produce. When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939, Steinbeck dedicated it to his wife Carol, who willed this book. She also critiqued, edited, titled, and typed it. And he also dedicated it to Tom Collins, who lived it. Steinbeck charted the Jode family's displacement, exodus to California, and evolving group consciousness, which he called the movement from I to We. His epic saga of their struggle to survive immediately became a bestseller, refocused the nation's attention on the migrant suffering, and accentuated the death of the dream of the Far West as a promised land. Continuing the theme of man's inhumanity to man, Steinbeck captured the contours of racism that white Oklahomans expressed at home and experienced in trying to find home in the meeting grounds of California. He emphasized how their sense of place was formed in part through their experience of conquest and settlement, writing, Grandpa took up the land and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. But when the Jodes, driven away themselves by the banks and the tractors, reach California, they become the new targets, as evidenced in the casual comment of one service station attendant to another. Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live like they do. A human being couldn't stand to be so dirty and miserable. They ain't a hell of a lot better than gorillas. This was Steinbeck's pen, but it was not Steinbeck's voice as he highlighted reactive regionalism. Steinbeck's depiction of the conditions in Oklahoma and California led to a backlash from conservative politicians and business interests. Oklahoma critics emphasized the book's vulgarity, irreverent treatment of religion, lionizing of those who fled rather than those who remained, and its depiction of the state as a barren, poverty-ridden wasteland, all at a time when leaders were trying to attract business investment. Congressman Lyle Boren famously declared the book a lie, a damnable lie, a black infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind. California critics rejected Steinbeck's depictions of the mistreatment of migrant families and workers by agribusiness interests, and his positive treatment of federal efforts to assist them through the camp system. Steinbeck, vilified as a liar, a communist, and a Jew, was deeply troubled by the backlash, especially by the lies the Associated Farmers spread in newspapers that the Okies resented and rejected his depiction of them, hated him, and wanted to kill him. Newspapers in California published contrived testimonials from Okie migrants rejecting the novel and emphasizing their good treatment by California growers. California businesses' coordinated campaign against the novel amounted to life imitating art imitating life, as they sought to discredit a literary representation of their own repressive actions. Steinbeck had predicted as much when he insisted that all the verses and the music to The Battle Hymn of the Republic be printed inside the covers of the novel, explaining that the fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary, adding that the battle hymn is American, and intensely so, and would help undermine their efforts to apply the communist label to the book. Literary scholar Christopher Bowman's recently gathered evidence from the newspapers published by the residents of the Farm Security Administration camps demonstrates their deep appreciation for Steinbeck's efforts. Those sources demonstrate that the novel was widely read, even in the Arvin Sanitary Camp, despite the Kern County Library's ban on the book. Long waiting lists formed to borrow The Grapes of Wrath from camp libraries. The work was discussed in camp resident reading groups and even read in its entirety to groups of residents. Their response was overwhelmingly positive and reflected an appreciation for the author who had come to know them and understand the struggles that they faced. Pressure from migrants in the Farm Security Administration camps actually helped determine where in the Central Valley John Ford's and Daryl Zanuck's powerful movie adaptation of the novel was shown, including early screenings in Tulare and Basalia in March 1940. The editor of one of the camp newspapers even referred to the camp residents as, we the jodes, demonstrating the affinity they felt with Steinbeck's portrayal. What played out in the wake of the book's publication and the movie's release constituted one of those pivotal moments in the nation's history when a literary work strikes a chord that encapsulates the core fault lines of the time so thoroughly and so forcefully that it makes history while chronicling it. The Grapes of Wrath was aimed at the conscience of the white middle-class American reading public at a time when that audience was beginning to grow bored of the struggles of the poor and the weight of evidence fell on the side of Steinbeck's truth. McWilliams's searing indictment of California agribusiness factories in the field was published in June 1939 and it reinforced the reality that field workers and their families were being oppressed, abused, and starved by the Associated Farmers who, like Steinbeck, McWilliams described as fascist. However, McWilliams provided far fuller coverage of the exploitation of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican labor. Structuring his narrative around the long history of worker exploitation by California agribusiness, McWilliams didn't even address the Dust Bowl migration until the end of the book. For Steinbeck in the Harvest Gypsies articles and in the Grapes of Wrath, that longer racially diverse history was a prelude to the white migrant story. Further validating Steinbeck's account of the exploitation and oppression of white migrant families, Bristol's photographs taken during his travels with Steinbeck in the winter of 1937 to 38 appeared, along with some by Lange, in the April 1939 issue of Fortune magazine and in Life magazine in June. Bristol's images were used during the casting and costuming of the Grapes of Wrath movie, which also drew heavily on Tom Collins' expertise. Further augmenting the weight of positive opinion behind Steinbeck's novel, a second Life article appeared in February 1940, featuring Bristol's Jodes and the movie's characters side by side with the telling title, Speaking of Pictures, These by Life Prove Facts in Grapes of Wrath. The movie was released to great critical acclaim and drew large audiences. A Grapes of Wrath evening, a benefit concert at New York City's Forest Theater in early March 1940, featured Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Woody Guthrie. Meanwhile, Steinbeck's novel directed national political attention on the migrants' misfortune. From late 1939 to early 1940, Robert La Follette's Senate Investigatory Committee held hearings on the conditions in California. FDR expressed his appreciation for Steinbeck's treatment of the migrant struggle in a radio address in January. Eleanor Roosevelt affirmed the novel's accuracy when she toured California in April. Steinbeck received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in May, and Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads album was released that July and featured the seven-minute, two-part musical synopsis of the movie, Ballad of Tom Jode. These developments contributed to the growing consensus that the Southern Plains migrant families needed and deserved sympathy and assistance. Lange captured this sentiment brilliantly and ironically too in a photograph of a large billboard in the San Joaquin Valley for the movie, playing in Modesto, with the billboard itself serving as a physical windbreak for a migrant pea picker's camp located right behind it. While The Grapes of Wrath proved successful in the court of public opinion, Congress in the early 40s failed to pass the La Follette Committee's bill to counter oppressive labor practices. California agribusiness crushed the Congress of Industrial Organization-affiliated United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America, which included many formerly independent Mexican and Filipino unions. The larger enterprise of securing humane conditions and decent wages for the state's agricultural workers across color lines remains ongoing. The fortunes of the Southern Plains migrants improved because of government subsidies for the defense industry, which provided hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the 40s, but systematic racism remained firmly in place during the war years as they enjoyed far greater access to those employment opportunities than workers of color. Steinbeck's advocacy was incomplete. The Grapes of Wrath successfully championed the positive role of progressive government in helping the oppressed, while contemporaneous chronicles about the South failed to do so. This was because of the mythic power of the West as a promised land, even when inverted to show the death of the Western and California dream, but it was also because the novel's racial populism celebrated the story of white Protestant plain people, the human foundation of Western mythology. Steinbeck did not explode the Ternarium myth of frontier opportunity. He encapsulated the New Deal principle of enlightened government's role as a necessary safety net to replace the safety valve of the frontier, but Steinbeck's novel had the same white heroes as Turner's frontier thesis. Steinbeck's Oklahoma narrative, as Ryan Hall has shown, was marked by obvious geographical, environmental, economic, and demographic inaccuracies. Steinbeck placed Eastern Oklahoma's Salisbury and Sequoia County at the center of the Dust Bowl, which affected primarily just the far Western panhandle counties of the state. He presented mechanization, tractors replacing people at the behest of corporations, as the other principal factor behind the displacement of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, though Sequoia County experienced only very limited mechanization in the 30s and had no corporate farms. The demographic picture of mass migration in The Grapes of Wrath was memorably encapsulated not just by the departing Jode family, but also by the few fragile souls left behind in a barren, abandoned landscape. Souls like Muley Graves, the old graveyard ghost. However, the county's population actually increased 19% during the decade. Another factor in the tension between literary license and the writing of history while it is happening concerns the racial landscape of Eastern Oklahoma. Art historian James Swenson reminds us that FSA photographer Russell Lee, inspired by The Grapes of Wrath, which he used as a shooting script, traveled to Oklahoma, the home of the fictional Jodes, to actualize Steinbeck's fiction by pursuing and photographing the real Jodes. Russell captured the cultural richness of Eastern Oklahoma far more comprehensively than Steinbeck. Lee's June 1939 photographs of the economically distressed Native American and African American residents of Sequoia and nearby counties, each group constituting approximately 10% of Sequoia County's population, as well as the poor white residents, presented a more accurate and diverse picture than Steinbeck. World War II ended the white migrant crisis, but not the larger problem of mistreatment of agricultural workers. The war also serves as a noteworthy coda to Steinbeck's racial attitudes during this period. In early December 1941, in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war against Japan and Germany, Steinbeck sent a memo to FDR recommending a precise course of government action toward Japanese-origin people on the West Coast involving the use of a loyalty test. He contended that the vast majority of Issei and Nisei were unquestionably loyal to the United States and would help identify those who were not, and that anyone who was not loyal would on principle refuse to take the test and could be interned or deported. The plan was far from perfect. The administering of a loyalty test exclusively to any particular racial group or national group was and remains thoroughly undemocratic. Nonetheless, Steinbeck became the first American writer of note to oppose relocation and internment, and he had tried to lead the president down a better path before the policy was put in motion. From April to July, the Salinas Rodeo Grounds were used to confine nearly 4,000 Nisei before they were relocated to more permanent camps. Soon after the United States entered the war, Steinbeck entered the service of the government. However, even in that role, he'd pay a price for his social advocacy and adherence to the ancient commission of the writer. As the War Office investigated him for radicalism, interviewing his friends, acquaintances, and neighbors about his actions and associations in the 30s, Steinbeck served his country as a war propagandist. In 1942, his novella play The Moon Is Down was published, and it charted resistance to the Nazi invasion in Scandinavia. The work was distributed by resistance movements and translated into the language of virtually every Nazi-occupied European country. Steinbeck received an award from the King of Norway for bolstering the morale of the citizenry, and Warner Brothers paid a staggering $300,000 for the movie rights. At FDR's urging, Steinbeck traveled to Air Force bases around the United States to observe the training of pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners, and he wrote Bombs Away, the story of a bomber team. Meanwhile, Steinbeck passed his Army physical, but his request for officer rank in Army Air Force intelligence was denied, and the Monterey draft board made it difficult for him to secure the necessary passport papers from the War and State Departments for his travels as a correspondent. On June 3, 1943, Steinbeck departed on a troop ship for England in the employ of the New York Herald Tribune. His wartime dispatches, 85 in total from England, North Africa, and Sicily, appeared in the Herald Tribune between June and December 1943 and were syndicated in newspapers all across the country except for Oklahoma, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and South America. Ernie Pyle said of John Steinbeck, we have no other writer so likely to catch on paper the inner things that most people don't know about war. Steinbeck had been on the front lines for the invasion of Italy. He returned to New York in October 1943 with burst eardrums, partial amnesia, and PTSD. Upon his return, Steinbeck began writing Cannery Row. He later recalled that a group of soldiers had asked him to write something funny that isn't about the war. We're sick of war. Based on the life of his close friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who'd influenced his non-teleological and eye-to-wee thinking, Cannery Row was a celebration of non-conformity. Steinbeck's treatment of an endearing collection of characters living on the edges of Monterey's society might even be considered the first novel of the American counterculture. In the work, he refers to Mack and the boys, the self-defined social outcasts, as the virtues, the beatitudes, the beauties. Their non-conformity is matched in the novel's form, which is hero-less, plotless, and thoroughly non-teleological, marked by the infinity of possibility, by unrelated, irrelevant details, sometimes running in one direction and leading to unfortunate consequences that are so unintended as to throw into question any sense of causality, order, or even purpose. Yet Steinbeck draws the reader into the world of Cannery Row as a full participant and establishes a morality and human decency amidst the chaos. Like the Central Valley in The Grapes of Wrath, the Monterey of Cannery Row is an incomplete portrait of a diverse racial landscape. Connie Chang rightly cautions us that Steinbeck pays little attention to a huge segment of the Cannery Row population, the immigrants who labored in the fish plants and plied the local waters, and the relationships that they forged. Similarly, Laurie Flores reminds us that the ways in which Salinas and California built their wealth on the backs of farm workers during the 20th century, particularly Latino ones, are often glossed over in tourist-driven historical narratives of places like Steinbeck country. But Steinbeck in turn would not have recognized the idealized re-envisioning of his regional landscape. While he failed to capture the full cultural richness and racial diversity of his California settings, Cannery Row is far more realistic than romantic in portraying Monterey. It was hardly the kind of book the Tourist Bureau would have welcomed. Yet over time, the place he depicted became a major tourist destination and counter-intuitively so in part because of his gritty and compelling, albeit incomplete, picture of life at its ragged fringes. Steinbeck had spent most of the 1940s and 50s in New York when he decided to travel across the country in 1960 with his dog Charlie. During that famous trip he visited the Monterey Peninsula and was shocked by the nearly unrecognizable place he'd unwittingly helped create. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they're not likely to wipe out, he wrote. Steinbeck reflected sadly on his visit to Monterey. My old friends, he said, wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right, Steinbeck concluded. You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory. Still, the mothballs of memory have their value and Steinbeck is worth remembering in our own fraught time. The Depression years are vital to understanding the struggles between liberals and conservatives over the role of the federal government that still dominate American politics. The government stepped in to help the nation's poor, hungry, and sick on a scale never previously undertaken and spent more per capita in the West than in any other region. The New Deal programs were inspired, supported, and promoted by artists, musicians, actors, and writers such as Steinbeck who believed he had a moral responsibility to use his pen in the service of humanity. That purposeful alignment between progressive federal mission and responsibility and the ancient commission of the writer is worth celebrating and emulating. In our own age, marked by the displacement of millions of people globally, when migrants and refugees are feared, dehumanized, and demonized by some national, state, and local leaders rather than welcomed, supported, and appreciated, it wouldn't hurt to recall the plight of those displaced migrants from the Southern Plains who the subjects of Steinbeck's pen and Lange's and Bristol's cameras. But we should not forget that they were an unrepresentative fragment of a larger, more diverse and continuing story of oppression and dehumanization of migratory agricultural workers in the garden of the world and across the West that demands our attention and advocacy today. From 1935 to 1945, John Steinbeck struggled mightily to expose our many grievous faults and failures. While more progressive than most of his contemporaries on matters of race, his emphasis on the white Southern Plains migrants obscured the struggles of workers and families of color. Nonetheless, he found meaning, purpose, and value in the hard-lived existence of working people. He celebrated ostensibly ordinary lives and in doing so demonstrated that they were in fact extraordinary and instructive. He called out oppression, exploitation, and vigilantism and offered some of the most moving accounts of poverty and sickness in all American letters. He insisted that government had a responsibility to protect and assist its most vulnerable citizens. He recognized a public health crisis in the California fields and highlighted the human suffering that accompanied the absence of medical care and proper nutrition. He accused and shamed those in power who facilitated, exacerbated, and profited from the crisis. He firmly believed that enlightened government had a place in America and that's a hope that warrants a serious restoration. Those are the features of Steinbeck country and Steinbeck the activist writer that we should remember. In one of the most memorable passages in modern American literature and film, Steinbeck's Tom Joe declares, wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Half a lifetime later in the opening lines of his last book, America and Americans, Steinbeck wrote, our land is of every kind geologically and climactically and our people are of every kind also, of every race, of every ethnic category, and yet our land is one nation and our people are Americans. It took Steinbeck a lifetime to reach that point in his thinking where his advocacy for racial diversity matched his advocacy for the working poor, but he got there in the end. His fiction and non-fiction works in the middle third of the 20th century helped create a shared national culture that was progressive and empathetic. In the better part of a lifetime since his passing, it seems that a large part of the national populace has fallen away from that understanding of national strength through diversity and the national preoccupation with the middle class has long thrown a veil over the suffering of the poor. We would do well to remember both as well as the power of activist literature to help us remember. Thanks so much for your patience.