In John Steinbeck's series of articles for The San Francisco News, "The Harvest Gypsies," there is a tone of detachment that is also evident in his fiction. This tone of detachment shows that Steinbeck was a writer who believed in realism. Steinbeck's background in journalism shaped his writing style in fiction. One can interpret The Grapes of Wrath, one of Steinbeck's most well-known and critically-acclaimed novels, as a form of documentary about the lives of farmers in Depression-era Oklahoma and California.
However, "The Harvest Gypsies," is an actual journalist work and captured the socioeconomic issues of the time in great detail. In particular, the series documented the lives and issues of migrant workers in the Central Valley and Lower Colorado River Valley regions of California.
As a reporter, Steinbeck's tone and style in writing the series allows the readers to sympathize with the migrants' plight...
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while also gaining then-new information about the effects of the Great Depression. Steinbeck did not write the series in a dramatic style—as it was a work of journalism—and did not portray the migrants as victims of economic crises.
Instead, he portrayed the migrants realistically, without embellishment, and allowed his subjects to tell the stories themselves. In this sense, Steinbeck is similar to an ethnographer or interpreter. He simply recorded their personal narratives, and it was up to the newspaper readers to come up with their own conclusions.
How does Steinbeck's detached view in "The Harvest Gypsies" illuminate migrant workers' plight?
Steinbeck, in quite a matter-of-fact way, describes the circumstances of three families in one typical migrant workers' camp in California. His presentation of the facts pertaining to their lives is detached and unemotional, despite the incredible tragedies they have endured, because such a tone draws attention to the way these individuals have been treated by society. In the final paragraphs of the article, Steinbeck describes the social workers who have come and gone from the camp. Of the families, he says,
They are filed and open for inspection. These families have been questioned over and over about their origins, number of children living and dead. The information is taken down and filed. That is that. It has been done so often and so little has come of it.
Even the people whose job it is to help the workers and their families are impotent, possibly because they cannot really do anything of value to help these families or because the need is just too great. All they can do is take down information, keeping track of who is where, because there is little other assistance they can offer. Thus, the people are all but forgotten by the rest of the country, people who still have jobs and homes, because we have a tendency to look out for ourselves and ignore the suffering of others, especially if we cannot see it. Others might "hear much about the free clinics for the poor, [though] these people do not know how to get the aid and they do not get it." Steinbeck's tone emphasizes the detachment with which the rest of America views the migrants, if they are even thought of at all.
Further, this narrative detachment, when juxtaposed with the unimaginable details of these families' lives, renders their plight all the more horrible by contrast. In Steinbeck's description of the first family, he says, without emotion, "The spirit of this family is not quite broken." It's as though the breaking of spirits is so common in these camps that the mention of it does not even warrant emotion. Were one to become emotional every time a spirit is broken, one would not cease to emote. The detached voice reminds us that, although the lives of these families may strike us as exceptional and out of the ordinary, they are anything but for these migrant families who routinely lose their dignity, their children, and even their will to live.