Is the vision conveyed in the Steinbeck book and movie an accurate one?
ALAN BRINKLEY: I think John Steinbeck painted a reasonably accurate portrait of the Okie migration – [although] somewhat romanticized. And the portrait of local police and local landowners and employers in California is somewhat polemical. But on the whole it is an accurate picture of the scale of the migration, of the desperation of many of the people who were going to California, of the hostility of the local population to them. Steinbeck of course grew up in California and lived in the Salinas Valley during the height of this migration, so he saw much of this personally and portrayed it fairly accurately. QUESTION: But the Steinbeck portrait only dealt with one part of the migration, right? ALAN BRINKLEY: Many of the so-called Okies didn’t go to California – they went to industrial cities in the Midwest and elsewhere, although of course there was very little employment for them [there] either. And there were many migrations from other parts of the country aside from the Dust Bowl –
