This Week in ‘Nation’ History: Here’s What John Steinbeck Would Have Thought of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Labor Organizing, Social Justice, Blog, From the Archive
For seventy-five years, industry has tried to paint organized workers as “red agitators.”

It is so important, when advocating for social justice, to have the right enemies. It’s a lesson the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have taken to heart, as The Nation’s Lee Fang shows in next week’s issue. Like other alt-labor organizations, the CiW—which has made impressive and promising gains in securing for Florida’s tomato pickers higher wages, safer working conditions, and freedom from sexual, physical and verbal harassment—has been hassled by shadowy operatives and right-wing front organizations funded by the very industry it is trying to reform. Last fall, the spokesperson for an anti-worker group showed up at a CiW rally with a man hoisting a Soviet flag in front of the Immokalee activists, as the spokesperson took pictures. Similarly, as Fang writes, “Picking fights with restaurant workers has been good business for out of work Republican operatives.”

The fight to win decent and humane treatment for farmworkers in the United States is one that, until recently, had made scandalously little progress in the seventy-five years since it first became a topic of national conversation with the publication of John Steinbeck’s novels during the Depression. In 1936, the same year he published In Dubious Battle—about radical activists trying to organize fruit pickers in California—Steinbeck wrote an essay for The Nation in which he described the dire situation faced by Dust Bowl migrants looking for work in California’s fields and directly identified the parties responsible.

Some of Steinbeck’s essay can be read as a précis for The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. The following passage could be a description of the Joads.

It is interesting to note that Steinbeck’s essay came a few months after Mary McCarthy’s scathing review of In Dubious Battle, from the March 11, 1936, issue of The Nation. She called the novel “academic, wooden, inert…. Mr. Steinbeck, for all his long and frequently pompous verbal exchanges, offers only a few, rather childish, often reiterated generalizations.”

* * *

Of course, the closest farmworkers in the United States came to genuine progress was the movement led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, which first achieved national prominence in the mid-1960s. It was neither a perfect nor an especially successful movement; as Marshall Ganz recently wrote at TheNation.com: “California farm workers today are in even worse shape than when Cesar’s struggle began. There is no union to speak of any more, nor has there been for years.” Nonetheless, Ganz adds, “The significance of the farm worker movement was quite real for a period of some fifteen years, enhanced by its role as a crucible for training a new generation of organizers who contributed to the progressive movement more broadly, and, in particular, as a spark for the broader Chicano movement.”

In 1978, the UFW initiated a campaign to convince the University of California to set aside for the farmworkers a portion of its research funding devoted to agricultural mechanization, arguing that the university and the state had a responsibility to help out the workers whose lives would be upended by increased automation. In “The Farm Workers’ Next Battle,” in the March 25, 1978 issue of The Nation, Chavez explained his thinking:

* * *

In a more recent example of The Nation’s coverage of the farmworkers struggle, former Nation poverty correspondent Greg Kaufmann profiled the Coalition of Immokalee Workers—first discussed in The Nation by Mica Rosenberg, a former intern now at Reuters, in “The Trouble With Tomatoes” (April 1, 2002). In his article on “How to Build an Anti-Poverty Movement, From the Grassroots Up,” from this past February, Kauffman wrote:

In the roughly seventy-five years since farmworkers began organizing for their rights, the nature and tactics of the opposition have, in their essentials, never changed. Neither should the determination of the farmworkers’ friends. “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat,” Tom Joad promises his mother in The Grapes of Wrath, “I’ll be there.”

* * *

Subscribers to The Nation can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.
For seventy-five years, industry has tried to paint organized workers as “red agitators.”
It is so important, when advocating for social justice, to have the right enemies. It’s a lesson the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have taken to heart, as The Nation’s Lee Fang shows in next week’s issue. Like other alt-labor organizations, the CiW—which has made impressive and promising gains in securing for Florida’s tomato pickers higher wages, safer working conditions, and freedom from sexual, physical and verbal harassment—has been hassled by shadowy operatives and right-wing front organizations funded by the very industry it is trying to reform. Last fall, the spokesperson for an anti-worker group showed up at a CiW rally with a man hoisting a Soviet flag in front of the Immokalee activists, as the spokesperson took pictures. Similarly, as Fang writes, “Picking fights with restaurant workers has been good business for out of work Republican operatives.” The fight to win decent and humane treatment for farmworkers in the United States is one that, until recently, had made scandalously little progress in the seventy-five years since it first became a topic of national conversation with the publication of John Steinbeck’s novels during the Depression. In 1936, the same year he published In Dubious Battle—about radical activists trying to organize fruit pickers in California—Steinbeck wrote an essay for The Nation in which he described the dire situation faced by Dust Bowl migrants looking for work in California’s fields and directly identified the parties responsible. Some of Steinbeck’s essay can be read as a précis for The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. The following passage could be a description of the Joads. It is interesting to note that Steinbeck’s essay came a few months after Mary McCarthy’s scathing review of In Dubious Battle, from the March 11, 1936, issue of The Nation. She called the novel “academic, wooden, inert…. Mr. Steinbeck, for all his long and frequently pompous verbal exchanges, offers only a few, rather childish, often reiterated generalizations.” * * * Of course, the closest farmworkers in the United States came to genuine progress was the movement led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, which first achieved national prominence in the mid-1960s. It was neither a perfect nor an especially successful movement; as Marshall Ganz recently wrote at TheNation.com: “California farm workers today are in even worse shape than when Cesar’s struggle began. There is no union to speak of any more, nor has there been for years.” Nonetheless, Ganz adds, “The significance of the farm worker movement was quite real for a period of some fifteen years, enhanced by its role as a crucible for training a new generation of organizers who contributed to the progressive movement more broadly, and, in particular, as a spark for the broader Chicano movement.” In 1978, the UFW initiated a campaign to convince the University of California to set aside for the farmworkers a portion of its research funding devoted to agricultural mechanization, arguing that the university and the state had a responsibility to help out the workers whose lives would be upended by increased automation. In “The Farm Workers’ Next Battle,” in the March 25, 1978 issue of The Nation, Chavez explained his thinking: * * * In a more recent example of The Nation’s coverage of the farmworkers struggle, former Nation poverty correspondent Greg Kaufmann profiled the Coalition of Immokalee Workers—first discussed in The Nation by Mica Rosenberg, a former intern now at Reuters, in “The Trouble With Tomatoes” (April 1, 2002). In his article on “How to Build an Anti-Poverty Movement, From the Grassroots Up,” from this past February, Kauffman wrote: In the roughly seventy-five years since farmworkers began organizing for their rights, the nature and tactics of the opposition have, in their essentials, never changed. Neither should the determination of the farmworkers’ friends. “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat,” Tom Joad promises his mother in The Grapes of Wrath, “I’ll be there.” * * * Subscribers to The Nation can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.