On Reading the Grapes of Wrath by Susan Shillinglaw

Author:Susan Shillinglaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“THEY’S A LOT A FELLAS WANTA KNOW WHAT REDS IS.”

JOHN STEINBECK WAS a lifelong Democrat, never a Communist, even though he edged close to the cause in the mid- to late 1930s. Layer three—life histories embedded in the novel—also includes the story of Communist labor organizers, who, during the 1930s, helped coordinate a series of furious strikes in California fields.

I once interviewed Caroline Decker, who helped organize the 1933 agricultural strikes in California, for which she was charged with criminal syndicalism and imprisoned for three years. But at the time, she told me, she wasn’t even sure she was a member of the party, never having paid any dues. “If you said, ‘Hey, I’m a Communist,’ everyone believed you.” Caroline Decker was a young woman willing to fight for labor rights at age nineteen, one of a “motley bunch of ignoramuses” who really “did not know” quite what they were doing, she said. The Communist organizers were certainly “not a highly organized or well-financed group. They were idealists, willing to plunge where angels fear to tread. . . . Babes in the woods,” in her words. Perhaps not quite that, but from 1933 to 1939, the Communist Party’s membership in America tripled, and the party attracted many liberals: in Decker’s words, they were living at a time of “great need and felt very strongly about rights.”

It was a “very dangerous” time to do what she did, organizing workers in the Pennsylvania coal mines at nineteen, in the fields of California at twenty and twenty-one. But, she added, “If you weren’t attracted to communism in the 1930s you were a hunk of protoplasm.” With the collapse of capitalism, with banks failing and farms going under and people living with no safety net and little food, an alternate system seemed preferable to capitalism.

In the mid-1930s, Steinbeck’s Carmel neighbor Lincoln Steffens convinced John and Carol to attend meetings of the local John Reed Club, although neither joined the fiery little Communist group, about thirty strong in Carmel. They weren’t “joiners,” said the club’s founder. “John was a careful, meticulous observer” and, claimed Steffens’s wife, Ella Winter, “very shy.” When Steffens suggested that Steinbeck write about labor conditions in California, the writer was intrigued. Steffens helped arrange meetings between Steinbeck and labor organizers who were hiding out in the Monterey region.

A couple of years earlier the Communist Party had sidled into California when the wages plummeted from an average of 25–30 cents an hour in the 1920s to sometimes half that in the early 1930s. As worker dissatisfaction simmered, labor organizers fueled their discontent. In Decker’s eyes, it was a boil ready to pop. In their efforts to organize California field-workers, the organizers were pitted against mighty growers and shippers as well as powerful business interests throughout the state. A nasty strike had broken out in Central Valley orchards in 1933 at the Tagus Ranch near Tulare, operated by H. C. Merritt Jr., who grew peaches—delicate and necessary to pick quickly. In Visalia, two workers were gunned down by growers during a peaceful demonstration.

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