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.

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