Today in Labor History August 27, 1934: 7,000 Filipino lettuce cutters and mainly white packing shed workers went on strike against the powerful Salinas Valley growers and shippers, demanding union recognition & improved wages and working conditions. Many of the white workers were Dust Bowl refugees. Most of the Filipino workers had immigrated as U.S. nationals, after the U.S. took over the Philippines, in the wake of the Spanish-American War. There was rampant persecution of Filipino workers in California. Laws prohibited Filipino women from immigrating to the U.S. and prevented Filipino men from consorting with Anglo women. The American Federation of Labor initially refused to recognize or support the Filipino Labor Union (FLU). Scabs and vigilantes viciously beat Filipino strikers and chased 800 out of the Salinas Valley at gunpoint. They also burned down a labor camp. Police arrested picketers and union leaders for violation of the Criminal Syndicalism laws (laws that prohibited advocating any change to the economic and political status quo). The FLU ultimately won a raise and union recognition. However, discrimination and racist violence against Filipinos continued.

Steinbeck wrote about the plight of Filipino migrant farmworkers in the Salinas Valley in a 1936 series of articles for the San Francisco News called “The Harvest of Gypsies,” which formed part of the basis for his novel, Grapes of Wrath. He said they were among the most discriminated, and best organized, ethnic group in the U.S. Their organizing, he went on to say, brought on terrorism against them by vigilantes and the government.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #union #strike #filipino #Salinas #farmworkers #racism #immigration #colonialism #police #PoliceBrutality #vigilantes #DustBowl #Steinbeck #journalism #books #author #writer #fiction @bookstadon

“I do know this—the big and mysterious America is bigger than I thought. And more mysterious.”

Travels with Charley in Search of America
John Steinbeck
#steinbeck #johnsteinbeck #travelswithCharley #bookstodon

“Then I crossed the great arch hung from filaments and I was in the city I knew so well.

It remained the City I remembered, so confident of its greatness that it can afford to be kind. It had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency...”

Travels with Charley in Search of America
John Steinbeck #sanFrancisco #steinbeck #bookstodon #travelswithCharley #johnSteinbeck

“I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”

Travels with Charley in Search of America
John Steinbeck
#steinbeck #travelswithcharley #bookstodon #johnsteinbeck

“I hadn’t been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.”

Travels with Charley in Search of America
John Steinbeck
#steinbeck #johnsteinbeck #travelsWithCharley #bookstodon

“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”

Travels With Charley,
John Steinbeck #bookstodon #Steinbeck #travelsWithCharley

Sono entrata nelle ultime 100 pagine di East of Eden (Steinbeck) e già so che appena lo finisco lo mancheranno tantissimo i (alcuni) personaggi #mastolibri #steinbeck

@hansjager Mijn lievelingsboek #steinbeck is Grapes of Wrath, Druiven der Gramschap tijdloos mooi, actueel. #literatuur #boeken

@martinapugliese @troppacaffeina non so perché l'hanno sempre definito un libro per ragazzi!
La Valle dell'Eden è il libro più bello che abbia mai letto, #Steinbeck il migliore di sempre

RT @Letnapark@twitter.com

In den Herzen der Menschen wachsen die Früchte des Zorns wachsen und werden schwerer, schwer und reif zur Ernte.

14.4.1939 In den USA erscheint John #Steinbeck, *The Grapes of Wrath*

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Letnapark/status/1646742906181492736

You ever hear songs that take you somewhere else, maybe not even where the artist expected? Every time I hear this song, I think about “The Grapes of Wrath”; more specifically, the character of Tom Joad.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSQGWpy0qY

#Music #TheGrapesOfWrath #Steinbeck #Unintended #DustBowl

Today’s must-read thread from @doctorow is about what looks like a must-read book.
---
RT @doctorow
#Steinbeck never said that Americans see themselves as #TemporarilyEmbarrassedMillionaires, but that misquotation is so pervasive because it captures something vital about one version of the #AmericanDream.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed

1/
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1645520459109404673

Steinbeck 3.

Een poos geleden las ik het boek “Reizen zonder John” van Geert Mak.
Tijd om eens iets van deze John Steinbeck te lezen.
Ten oosten van Eden.

En van dat ogenblik af was haar adem nooit meer helemaal zonder dranklucht. Zij dronk haar wijn altijd uit een eetlepel, het was altijd medicijn, maar na een poosje haalde zij een halve liter per dag en zij was een heel wat rustiger en gelukkiger vrouw.

#Steinbeck #GeertMak #TenoostenvanEden #lezen #boeken

Zie ook Steinbeck 1 + 2

Today in Labor History February 27, 1902: John Steinbeck was born on this date in Salinas, California. He wrote numerous novels from the perspective of farmers and working-class people, including “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Tortilla Flats” “Of Mice and Men,” “Cannery Row,” and “East of Eden.” In 1935, he joined the communist League of American Writers. He faced contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. The FBI and the IRS harassed him throughout his career. Yet he wrote glowingly about U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 and the Pulitzer in 1939.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #Steinbeck #pulitzer #NobelPrize #strike #union #literature #fiction #fbi #communism #novel @bookstadon

@alena_03 the quote turns out to actually not be directly from Steinbeck but an interpretation of some things that he did say but I think this does answer your question

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

#Quote #Steinbeck #Socialism #NotExactQuote

This great story of #Steinbeck’s tour of #Russia — #Shevchenko #Ukraine in 1947; with the famous war photographer Robert Capa and a twice widowed elderly woman’s rejoinder to Capa’s spontaneous proposal of marriage:

“If God had consulted the cucumber before he made man, there would be less unhappy women in the world.”

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck
William Souder
#johnsteinbeck #bookstodon #robertcapa #madattheworld

“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
#bookstodon #steinbeck #canneryrow #johnsteinbeck #privilege

Souder references this passage from chapter 28 of The Grapes of Wrath:

“Git so I hate to think. Go diggin’ back to a ol’ time to keep from thinkin’. Seems like our life’s over an’ done.’’

#steinbeck #thegrapesofwrath #bookstodon #williamsouder #johnsteinbeck

John Steinbeck Biographer, William Souder on The Grapes of Wrath [1939] “So begins Steinbeck’s greatest novel—in a drought. It would end in a flood. These are forces of nature, and what happens in between—during one migrant family’s arduous journey to California—is the oldest human story: the struggle to survive and hold together. #bookstodon #steinbeck #thegrapesofwrath #1930s #immigration

“The unique nature of California agriculture requires that these migrants exist [..] Thus, in California we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and they are hated.”

John Steinbeck writing in ‘The Harvest Gypsies’, for The San Francisco News, October 5, 1936

#immigration #steinbeck #johnsteinbeck #pastisprologue #thingschangeyetremainthesame