Steinbeck as Anti-Fascist

In 1938 John Steinbeck wrote a statement in support of Republican Spain as part of the Writers Take Sides volume published by the League of American Writers. Joining an array of prominent authors who took an anti-fascist position in the collection of 418 “letters about the war in Spain” (only one contributor supported Franco), Steinbeck’s brief statement was notable for its emphasis on what he described as a parallel form of fascism in the United States. “Just returned from a little tour in the agricultural fields of California,” his letter begins. “We have our own fascist groups out here. They haven’t bombed open towns yet but in Salinas last year tear gas was thrown in a Union Hall and through the windows of workingmen’s houses. That’s rather close, isn’t it?”¹

Steinbeck was referring to the repression of farm workers by the large-scale corporate farm interests that dominated California agriculture. To equate this situation with fascism might seem a mere rhetorical flourish. For Steinbeck, however, it was a considered political conclusion. By this time he had made extensive visits to the squatters’ camps in California’s Central Valley, writing about the plight of migrant farm workers in a series of articles published in 1936 by the San Francisco News and reprinted (with a new epilogue) in 1938 as a pamphlet entitled Their Blood Is Strong.² The heart of the problem, Steinbeck argued, was the intertwined economic and political power of the “speculative farmers” (corporate farms) organized as Associated Farmers, Inc., and tightly linked to banks, newspaper publishers, and politicians. This alliance—what Steinbeck elsewhere labeled a “fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers”—employed a variety of coercive means to secure cheap labor, including the physical violence used to defeat workers’ organizing efforts. More broadly, Steinbeck worried that the state as a whole was losing its democratic character under the sway of agribusiness: “If … as has been stated by a large grower, our agriculture requires the creation and maintenance at any cost of a peon class, then it is submitted that California agriculture is economically unsound under a democracy. … Fascistic methods are more numerous, more powerfully applied, and more openly practiced in California than any other place in the United States.”³ Such views, of course, would also be forcefully expressed by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, largely written between May and October of 1938.

In light of this sustained attention to the threat of fascism, the following analysis explores the nature of Steinbeck’s anti-fascist politics as a basis for understanding his overall political views, including in particular the scope and boundaries of his ties to the left between the late 1930s and World War II. Scholars have in fact devoted much attention to exploring Steinbeck’s radicalism (or lack thereof) in this period, with perspectives ranging from emphasizing his liberalism and New Deal affinities, to asserting a growing radicalism that led to The Grapes of Wrath, to aligning his work with the genre of proletarian fiction and stressing his engagement with the Communist Party and the Popular Front.⁴ Yet the significance of anti-fascism as a starting point for analyzing Steinbeck’s politics during the 1930s has received little sustained attention. Even those works devoted to considering Steinbeck’s wartime efforts against fascism have not emphasized the connection between this activity and his earlier response to what he saw as domestic fascism in California agribusiness in the 1930s. One scholar goes so far as to misleadingly assert that Steinbeck did not get involved in “antifascist committees and efforts in the thirties, because he was absorbed in the problems of the economy and his own writings about them.”⁵ Against this claim, an analysis of Steinbeck’s response to fascism can provide us with a central thread that ties together his major cultural and political activities across the New Deal and wartime eras.

Disregard for the depth and consistency of Steinbeck’s concern with fascism is particularly significant since anti-fascism has in recent years received renewed attention as a central aspect of left-aligned cultural...