Dust Bowl Kern County: The Harvest Gypsies Steinbeck Wrote About

In the summer of nineteen thirty-six, John Steinbeck drove into Kern County and spent time in the agricultural labor camps documenting what he found for the San Francisco News. He was not yet famous. The Grapes of Wrath was three years away. What he wrote that summer was a seven-part series called The Harvest Gypsies, and it is clinical in a way the novel is not. It describes in specific, technical detail what the migrant camps looked like, what the sanitation was, what the children were dying of within two miles of fields producing food that would be loaded onto trucks and eaten by people in cities who did not know any of this was happening.

The Kern County Board of Supervisors, after the novel came out in nineteen thirty-nine, attempted to ban it from county libraries. That detail is worth sitting with for a moment. The county whose residents Steinbeck had documented, whose conditions he had described accurately enough that a government body felt compelled to suppress the account, tried to prevent its own citizens from reading it.

Between nineteen thirty and nineteen forty, an estimated one point three million people migrated to California from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and surrounding states. Kern County, at the bottom of the valley, received a disproportionate share. Okie was not a neutral regional term: it was a slur. Kern County passed anti-vagrancy ordinances aimed specifically at migrants. The Los Angeles police chief set up what he called a bum blockade at the state border to turn them back.

The Kern County Museum in Bakersfield, whose Pioneer Village contains more than fifty original historic structures, is the primary interpretive site for understanding the demographic transformation this migration produced. The museum's documentation of the migrant experience is unusual in its specificity. Steinbeck is memorialized in Salinas, where he was born. The county he documented sits south of here, and you are driving through it.