George Henderson

The winter of 1937-38 was especially wet in the San Joaquin Valley. Steady
and heavy rains saturated the San Joaquin flood plain, particularly in cotton-
growing Madera County. In February of that winter John Steinbeck wrote
to his agent Elizabeth Otis:

I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand
families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving.
The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them
with the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging
the thing all along the line and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent
there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women
are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the
first and I must knock these murderers on the heads. Do you know what
they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in
camps with proper sanitary facilities, they will organize and that is the
bugbear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer. The states and
counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops
of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I'm
pretty mad about it. No word of this outside because when I have finished
my job the jolly old associated farmers will be after my scalp again
( Steinbeck and Wallsten158).

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