Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

Fortunately, there was an administration in Washington that understood. President Franklin Roosevelt was surrounded
by a circle of men who had something of a sense of history, something the blacks call a “feeling tone.” They knew that
ways, yet untried, had to be found to meet the need: the restoration of a people’s shattered faith in themselves. They
called on the skills of creative people to reveal the landscape, to touch the hearts and challenge the minds of America.
Government agencies, new to the American experience, came into being.
The Farm Security Administration (fsa) was one. Some of the most indelibly remembered photographs of the thirties
were the work of artists, commissioned by the fsa: among them, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea
Lange, and Ben Shahn. The durable documentaries, The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River were produced by the
fsa. The writer-director was the gifted film maker, Pare Lorentz, a friend and colleague of John Steinbeck.
It was in fact one of these New Deal agencies, the Resettlement Administration (RA), that collaborated with the author
in the work that subsequently became The Grapes of Wrath.
Let C. B. (Beanie) Baldwin tell it. He was deputy director of the Resettlement Administration: “I got a call from John
Steinbeck. He wanted some help. He was planning to write this book on migrant workers. Will Alexander and I were
delighted. 3 He said, ‘I’m writing about people and I have to live as they live.’ He planned to go to work for seven, eight
weeks as a pea picker or whatever. He asked us to assign someone to go along with him, a migrant worker. We chose a
little guy named Collins, out of Virginia.
“I paid Collins’ salary, which was perhaps illegal. He and Steinbeck worked in the fields together. Steinbeck did a very
nice thing. He insisted Collins be technical director of the film [of The Grapes of Wrath], this little migrant worker. And
he got screen credit.”
John Ford’s classic film is remarkably faithful to Steinbeck’s vision. Aside from Nunnally Johnson’s superb adaptation,
it may have been the presence of Tom Collins on the set that assured such detailed accuracy. Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl
ballads, a collection of eight memorable songs, were inspired not only by his own hard traveling but by the film, which
he had seen before he read the book.
Tom Collins became Steinbeck’s valued guide and companion, during all those workdays. It was he who offered folk
wisdom; the inside and outside of the ways, customs, and reflections of these people. “Detail, detail, detail,” Steinbeck
writes in his journal, “looks, clothes, gestures. I need this stuff. It is exact and just the stuff that will be used against
me if I am wrong. Tom is so good.” Collins became the model for Jim Rawley, the migrant camp director in the book.
He had himself managed one such camp. The second half of the book’s dedication is “To Tom, who lived it.”
The hard truth captured in The Grapes of Wrath was corroborated several months later with the publication of Factories
in the Field: The Story of Migratory Labor in California. It was the work of Carey McWilliams, the state’s Commissioner
of Immigration and Housing: a rare public servant.
Steinbeck had to have it just right; there was to be not even the slightest error. He knew that the powerful growers,
represented by the Associated Farmers, would be infuriated by the book. They were. “The Associated Farmers have
begun an hysterical personal attack on me both in the papers and a whispering campaign. I’m a Jew, a pervert, a drunk,
a dope fiend.”
In his journal, he tells of a friendly sheriff warning him against staying in hotel rooms alone. “The boys got a rape case
set for you. A dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream and you try to talk yourself out of that
one. They won’t touch your book but there’s easier ways.”
They did touch his book. They did more than that, on a couple of occasions, they burned it in his home town. Today,
Salinas has named a library after him and the Chamber of Commerce takes pride in being “Steinbeck Country.”
The battle is not quite over. Today, The Grapes of Wrath), the master work of a Nobel Laureate, is the second most banned
book in our school and public libraries.
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