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

Tom Collins managed a federal migrant labor camp in the Central Valley of California; he took Steinbeck on numerous visits to various migrant laborers across the Central Valley, which they would often make while riding in the bed of a truck. Collins provided Steinbeck with the necessary information about the migrant camps and granted Steinbeck access to the farmers who would eventually inspire The Grapes of Wrath. In that novel, Steinbeck modeled the character of Jim Rawley—manager of the fictitious government “Weedpatch Camp”—after Collins. Collins previously had worked as a director of a school for delinquent youth and a social worker during the first few years of the Depression. Steinbeck’s biographer refers to Collins as an “idealist, a utopian reformer, a romantic, yet also a good administrator” (vii). 

This federal government agency helped resettle and assist migrants fleeing the drought and lack of economic opportunity in the Midwest and elsewhere. It established camps for migrant laborers—like the one that Tom Collins managed—in the state of California. Some Californians opposed the Resettlement Administration’s efforts to establish these camps, but Steinbeck was a strong proponent of its ability to provide workers dignity and a supportive community. 

Steinbeck’s editor at The San Francisco News, George West, offered Steinbeck an assignment to report on the migrant farm laborers in California. This assignment led to the articles in The Harvest Gypsies and gave rise to Steinbeck’s seminal work The Grapes of Wrath.

This organization brought together large-scale farmers and their friends in large corporations during the 1930s. The Associated Farmers represented the large-scale corporatization of agriculture in California and opposed efforts by the farmworkers to unionize. 

The Good Neighbors was a women’s organization set up in one of the federal labor camps in California. The members, who were migrants themselves, greeted new migrant families and ensured that they had sufficient food, clothing, and any other necessities. Steinbeck pointed to this organization as an example of how migrants were capable of governing themselves without outside enforcement. 

The namesake of this society was a progressive individual who fought for migrant workers’ rights. Continuing in the same spirit, the Simon J. Lubin Society comprised reform-minded, middle-class people such as teachers and other workers who advocated for greater rights for migrant farmworkers in California. The organization published some of Steinbeck’s articles. However, the Society’s ambitions were no match for the powerful agricultural corporations in the state, which lobbied the California legislature to prevent the passage of labor reform bills.