Proletarian Roots

 “The National John Steinbeck Center,”Salinas, California, USA

Unlike the endless corn, alfalfa and soybeans grown in the central part of the U.S., the Salinas Valley, lined by low mountains on both sides, is a center for vegetables – artichokes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, strawberries, cauliflower and celery.  Driving by the huge, flat fields lined with irrigation pipes, and worked by crews of Latino farm laborers, it is obvious it is not Oakies and Dust Bowlers that plant and harvest the crops anymore.  Steinbeck grew up in Salinas and this section of the country and most of his books and stories are set here.  The echoes of the 1970s lettuce and grape boycotts initiated by the UFW still resonate, as does the apple pickers’ strike Steinbeck depicted in In Dubious Battle which happened in Watsonvillle, just north of Salinas.  The Grapes of Wrath came out of notes he read and trips he took to cover migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley, just west of San Francisco, for the San Francisco News.

Much like Faulkner, who grounded his narratives in a real place and county in Mississippi, Steinbeck mostly did the same, including using nearby Monterey as a setting for several books, Sweet Thursday and Cannery Row.  The middle-class Steinbeck family had a cottage in Pacific Grove, a small town on the Monterey peninsula, so he knew that area well.  The voyage depicted in the non-fiction book The Log of the Sea of Cortez originated in Monterey.  His longest book, East of Eden, was set in the Salinas Valley, partly based on the history of his own family. The house he lived in as a boy is two blocks from the museum, and is now a restaurant and gift shop.

The ‘Center’

So ‘place’ plays a huge role in Steinbeck’s fiction, which is why the museum center in Salinas dedicated to his writing seems a bit like a Chamber of Commerce celebration.  From information we gathered, the ‘center’ receives financial support from the growers in the Salinas Valley.  And that is significant. The museum is a series of spaces dedicated to his most famous books – East of Eden, the Red Pony, Grapes of Wrath, Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, The Pearl, Cannery Row, Travels With Charley.  The latter area features his original RV, named Rosinante after Don Quixote’s horse. There are also sections reflecting his journalism in WWII traveling with a combat unit in Italy, a trip to Russia in 1947 with photographer Robert Capa and his friendship with Ed Ricketts, a quirky scientist and central character in his Monterey books.   

The museum is geared to the casual visitor and student groups, with lots of references to films based on the books.  James Dean greets you on a big screen after you have looked at the black and white stills of Salinas town and Steinbeck’s family.  This reminds you that he wrote the scripts for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata too. His juvenile fascination with Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur as a young boy is a seminal inspiration, which led him to take a ‘happy’ trip to England later to investigate sites related to the Knights of the Round Table and Arthurian legend.  

The museum sections are somewhat dated and philosophically bereft according to my partner. In other words, how is Steinbeck relevant to today?  For my part the labor issues are ‘historicized’ – which means they are set in the distant past so as not to concern us now.  These are ‘the old days.’  The replacement of poor ‘white’ Depression workers with poor Latino workers is unremarked.  Nor is any idea of what Steinbeck might think of ICE trampling the fields of the Valley arresting workers, California ag strikes and boycotts since the 1930s or the disparagement of science by the current U.S. administration, especially regarding his love, marine biology.  After all, a Marxist organization or union is not paying the freight for this large, modern building at the end of Salinas’ Main Street.  

Steinbeck’s Politics

Steinbeck was a member of the League of American Writers, a CP front group, in 1935.  After the publican of Grapes of Wrath he was threatened by local bankers and growers, and he and his books became persona non grata in Salinas for a while. FBI Director Hoover hounded him with tax audits every year, though he couldn’t prove any nefarious associations.  This is much like what happened to Janis Joplin in her home town of Port Arthur or Sinclair Lewis and his hometown of Sauk Centre.  Now Steinbeck’s name is stuck on the sides of several businesses in the retro downtown, yearning for tourism. Salinas also seems to be the mural capital of Monterey County, with coffee shops and a large bookstore, so they are building on Steinbeck’s cultural capital.

In 1939 Steinbeck seemed to be a CP fellow traveler and signed a letter of support for the brutal Soviet invasion of Finland according to Wiki.  In 1951 he participated in a world peace conference and in 1952 still offered to work for the CIA according to the museum.  In 1957 he backed his friend Arthur Miller at the HUAC anti-Communist trials. In 1967 he supported the war in Vietnam where his sons were stationed, though later he said it was ‘unwinnable’ according to a line in the museum.  In the process he denounced young people in the anti-war movement.  His views on Jim Crow or Juan Crow are absent, yet he did work on Zapata.  

Steinbeck’s trajectory of humanist and liberal progressiveness turned into something else, a political zig-zag path for a celebrated writer as he dodged to avoid censure.  After the red-baiting NYT denounced him for getting the Nobel Prize in 1962 with the suspect ‘moral vision of the 1930s,’ he turned solely to non-fiction according to the museum website.  The Nobel had arrived because of his Long Island novel The Winter of Our Discontent – which dwelt on money-chasing, not explicit class struggle.

Little of this is in the museum itself because Steinbeck’s politics are left murky or absent.  I see museums as encouragement to read an author’s books, not definitive statements about a person or their writing.  At this time they are a popular destination show staged in a static building open to the general public, including children, referencing many movies, not a literature seminar at Stanford or a socialist study group on proletarian fiction. Writers are conditioned by the society their work is produced in, much as they try to rise above it.  This is inevitable.  And so is the handling of their memory.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Steinbeck,” “farm workers,” “proletarian fiction,” “Sweet Thursday,” “Winter of Our Discontent.”  

May Day has many class struggle, anti-racist, feminist and left-wing fiction books.  Come on in and buy one!

Kultur Kommissar / August 4, 2025 

Many 'Jungles' Now

 “Little Red Barns - Hiding the Truth, From Farm to Fable” by Will Potter, 2025 (Part 1)

Potter is a journalist who grew up in the punk milieu, which promoted animal rights.  He became a plant-based eater after witnessing the abuse suffered by farm animals in grainy black and white videos shown at punk shows.  The videos were peering into the secrets of the industrial animal food system, and it has infused his journalism since.  Potter decided to become a ‘witness’ to the brutality unleashed on farm animals, the planet, workers and other humans by 'Big Ag.'  His emphasis is not on sabotage, but on civil disobedience and especially journalistic whistle-blowing.  In this he comes up directly on the issue of censorship in the ag industry designed to hide the profitable functioning of animal cruelty and immense environmental damage. 

The image of the modern farm that children grow up with and many adults still believe is of apple-picking, hayrides, corn mazes and petting zoos.  And of course a nice red barn full of clean smelling hay bales. This book will disabuse you of that notion. In animal agriculture the ‘small farmer’ is almost dead.  Large farms, ranches and corporate entities dominate production.  Middle farms are contracted to large meat producers.  99% of animal production is in the combine’s hands.

Slaughterhouse workers, as was noted by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle,” are also ground up by the meat machine.  Injuries to workers in this industry are 40% higher than others.  Many are defenseless immigrants, some without papers, working at ridiculous speeds.  Some have to wear Pampers© because the bosses do not allow bathroom breaks.  Workers experience breathing problems, cuts, amputations, carpel tunnel, exhaustion and death.  There are 500K semi-secret child laborers in food industries, so laws to allow it are being presented in several states by ALEC.  Prisoners service fast food chains for pennies in a rerun of convict leasing.  Actual slavery is rampant world-wide in the ag industry in Brazil, Guatemala, Thailand, Mexico and others. Even people living around these ‘factories,’ like the giant Chinese-owned hog facility “Circle Four Farms” in Utah, suffer from breathing problems, asthma, diarrhea and the flu.  Circle Four is the biggest industrial hog farm in the state, at 90 square miles with 600k hogs ‘raised’ at a time.  It's not a little red barn.

Da Law?

Pott’s looks at state Ag-Gag laws which ban journalism; the national Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which criminalizes journalism and civil disobedience; and the profound weakness of the national Animal Welfare Act, which does not cover farm animals.  Then there is the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, but this only applies at the moment of death and does not include chickens or turkeys.  Add the leniency and collaboration of national meat inspectors from the Dept. of Agriculture with corporate farmers and the willing cooperation of local police and FBI arresting journalists and activists uncovering or ending animal abuse.  Behind that is the wholesale political support of the Meat lobby by both political Parties, who regularly appoint an Ag hack as head of the Department of Agriculture, who will repeat the mantra of ‘get big or get out.’  Together you have a recipe for a rural dictatorship by meat oligopolies.  Even activists filming from public property have been arrested, or charged with ‘animal cruelty’ in a classic case of projection.  In no other industry has ‘regulation’ been so lax. Potter calls it the ‘Wild West.’   

The biggest twist were state laws in Wyoming, North Carolina and Arkansas which widened ag-gag laws to include all ‘industrial operations.’  This banned whistle-blowing, information (data mining), photography and testimony far outside animal facilities, to every sector of the economy.  Capital gets privacy to do what it wants. 

Ag gag laws in 9 states were propounded and successfully passed by the Republican law-factory, ALEC, with Iowa being the first in 2011.  What are they hiding?  Well, sick animals still being used as food. Overflowing waste lagoons. Cruel and tiny cages. Standard animal ‘surgery’ without anesthetics.  Deforestation.  Animals being beaten and tortured. Hormones, anti-biotics and chemicals in the water. Sinking groundwater / river-lake levels due to alfalfa and hay production for animal feed. Terrible air quality. Polluted water. The worst are the waste lagoons, which kill workers and make neighbors sick or make them move.  A toxic ‘organic’ brown mist is even sprayed on crops as ‘fertilizer,’ which is then sold as food.  Potter takes a choking tour around Yakima, Washington to see the dairy cattle lagoons up close.  Some overflow onto public roads, to the point you cannot drive down them.  He calls it his ‘poop tour’ and it actually made him physically sick and unable to breathe. What if you lived next to one of these massive animal waste holes?  Ah, it's only those poor souls in rural areas...

A Centralized Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)

Just the Facts, Ma’am…

Here are some facts on inefficient, cruel and toxic industrial-scale animal agriculture:  1)  Only 2% of the population work in agriculture  It is highly mechanized now. 2) Hog, chicken and cow magazines encourage farmers to see animals as ‘machines.’ 3) 4 companies control each beef, pork and chicken industry. 4) Before activists started filming, there had never been a state animal cruelty investigation at a farm. 5) 200 million male chicks each year are ground up, gassed or electrocuted because they do not lay eggs. 6)  Undercover activists are arrested because they do not report the first abuse, as they are trying to establish a criminal pattern. 7) Prospective employees are screened for being pro-animal.  8)  The first ag-gag laws banned all coverage; the second criminalized giving false info on a job application; the third advocated anyone seeing animal abuse to notify them immediately.  This allowed them to fire one ‘bad apple,’ stopping the establishment of a pattern of abuse by the firm. 9) The animal food industry’s use of ‘terrorism law’ has spread internationally, as CAFO’s are now existing in many other countries, with the U.S. government aiding these efforts. 10)  A meat industry spokesperson said the ‘good news’ about ‘land-based protein’ was that awareness of animal cruelty, inefficiency, environmental damage and toxic byproducts ‘was low.’  11) 37 states exempt agriculture from animal cruelty laws. 12)  10 billion animals are slaughtered yearly in the U.S. 

Potter praises the work of PETA, the Humane Society, Compassion Over Killing, Compassionate Action for Animals, Mercy for Animals, the Western Watershed Project and the ASPCA.  He remarks that activist citizen journalists have replaced many established journalists on this ‘beat,’ by filming, getting jobs in slaughterhouses and animal holding cells and reporting abuse.  He himself tried to use drones to photograph the facilities and incidents, closer than satellite images, more distant than personal photography.  However none of these groups link industrial agriculture to capitalism itself or the profit motive.  How would a socially-responsible food system be run?

Potter cites plenty of studies and statistics to show that a plant-based diet would make huge strides in reducing global carbon emissions.  Plants need less water, less energy and less inputs overall than dairy, eggs or meat, with no shit, antibiotics or hormones. He thinks animal agriculture in countries where other foods are widely available can lead the way, especially those with huge CAFOs.  For him it is a far more effective ‘sacrifice’ to make then buying an electric car or not flying.  The average U.S. citizen eats 224 pounds of meat per year; the average European 152 pounds and the average African 22 pounds.  And that is not even mentioning the flood of cheese in the U.S. or Europe.  Ending or limiting animal ag would also have a huge effect on land use, for instance removing the reason to cut down the Brazilian rain forest, which is 87% motivated by cattle raising and feed.  But this book is not just a plea for being vegan.  It is a criticism of a capitalist industry that has outlasted itself, and become its opposite.   

(End of Part 1)

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  'Will Potter,' 'Green is the New Red,' 'CAFO,' ‘agriculture,’ ‘vegetarianism’ ‘veganism,’ ‘industrial agriculture,’ “Upton Sinclair.'

And I found it at May Day Books, which has many left books on agriculture. 

Red Frog / August 1, 2025