Laboring for Art

by

Lauren Roberts

As a boy, my father saw his parents lose their home during the Depression. Only ten years old, he stepped in to help the family survive by contributing his earnings from his ice cream and telegram delivery routes and later from his Navy pay. Shortly after leaving the Navy, he married my mother and went to work for unionized AT&T where he spent the next 35 years making a reliable living for his family. These experiences left him with a strong appreciation for the value of labor, the importance of labor unions and a passionate sense of fairness and decency that has passed to me.

Perhaps that is why At Work: The Art of California Labor (Heyday Books; $35) edited by Mark Dean Johnson, has affected me so strongly. A powerful visual examination of labor history, this book is a collaborative effort by San Francisco State University, the California Historical Society, the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and Heyday Books. It is filled with fantastic public images from more than 100 artists who recorded with pen, paint, woodcuts, lithographs, cameras and other artistic tools the tumultuous history of labor in California in the 20^th century.

This superbly designed coffee table-sized trade paperback celebrates the strength of those who fought for workers’ rights, and evokes the pain of the of the struggles and triumphs intended to bring dignity and decency to workers often not accorded much of either.

The history of labor in my native state is long, tumultuous and complicated. The art that honors it in this book travels from the rise of organized labor in the 1930s through World War II into the peak era of the California Labor School and the farm workers’ movement lead by Cesar Chavez in the 1960s to the weak and disadvantaged labor force of the late 20^th century’s service economy. Illuminating essays accompanying each chapter discuss in a direct, absorbing way a wide variety of topics associated with the labor movement: the romantic spirit of California culture vs. the contentious labor relations in the state; the rising influence of unions amid the Great Depression; the relationship of labor and art and its suppression during the McCarthy era; the re-emergence of organizing issues with the farm workers’ movement; and labor art’s role in our global economy.

But it is the artwork that dominates this book—and rightly so. From Dorothea Lange’s images of the unemployed, the Rosie the Riveters and the field workers and Diego Rivera’s The Tortilla Maker, this book soars with their well-known brilliance. But many lesser known artists and images including Ester Hernández’s The Virgin of the Streets, Lucienne Bloch’s woodcut Land of Plenty and Maynard Dixon’s Free Speech are equally stunning.

Why should anyone be interested in such art? Perhaps Gray Brechin best answers that when he says, "It is art’s mission to wake us to our common predicament and peril, and to our responsibilities toward one another and our home." Whether you agree or not, I strongly urge you to pick up this book because while the history of this subject would be fascinating in any format, nowhere is it presented in a more striking one than here.

The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (Heyday; $7.95), another compelling book about labor, is actually a collection of John Steinbeck’s 1936 articles for the San Francisco News. A short (62-page) trade paperback, The Harvest Gypsies is a gripping look at the reality that Steinbeck found and eventually transformed into the story of Ma and Pa Joad.

Steinbeck came to these articles when shortly after his book on a farm workers’ strike, In Dubious Battle, was published. He had established himself as knowledgeable about and interested in farm labor matters, so when an editor at the News approached him to write a series on the dust bowl migration which was then in full force in central California, he readily agreed. In the summer of 1936, Steinbeck began touring the rural agricultural areas in the company of Tom Collins, manager of a migrant camp for the Resettlement Administration. Tom Collins not only became Steinbeck’s guide but his model for Jim Rawley, manager of Wheatpatch Camp in The Grapes of Wrath.

Though the novel is unquestionably poignant, there is a brilliant, excruciating rawness in the people and policies he writes about in these articles because Steinbeck is writing exactly what he sees. These are real people, agonizingly alive, barely surviving in the squatter’s camps:

"Here, in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds against the borders of the camp. This man has tried to make a toilet by digging a hole in the ground near his paper house and surrounding it with an old piece of burlap. But he will only do things like that this year. He is a newcomer and his spirit and decency and his sense of his own dignity have not been quite wiped out. Next year he will be like his next door neighbor."

Steinbeck’s evocative words travel back and forth between individual descriptions of a family’s meager income and pitiable diet, the efforts of the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, the people who worked with the migrants, the policies of the large farms that exploited the migrants’ desperation and the history of imported labor. If you’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, this book will add another dimension to your understanding of the novel. If you haven’t, do so but read this book first as the superb prelude that it is.

Both of these books have my highest recommendation.

Since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to almost anyone who will listen. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it