John Steinbeck’s African-Americans—Author Susan Shillinglaw Clarifies the Context of the World War II Hero in “With Your Wings”

November 26, 2014 by 2 Comments

 Composite image of Susan Shillinglaw and John Steinbeck

The publication of John Steinbeck’s “With Your Wings” continues to stimulate conversation about the writer’s understanding of African-Americans and the roots and relevance of his forgotten World War II short story about a black Air Force aviator. Last week Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott challenged assumptions about the story’s origins. This week Susan Shillinglaw, author of On Reading The Grapes of Wrath and Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage, interprets the story’s African-American hero in the context of Steinbeck’s World War II experience and writings about African-American characters and issues. Like Robert DeMott, she responded generously to my request for expert comment about “With Your Wings.”

Susan Shillinglaw interprets the story’s African-American character in the context of Steinbeck’s World War II experience and writings about African-American characters and issues.

A professor of English at San Jose State University, she teaches the only regularly scheduled college-level John Steinbeck course offered anywhere. As Robert DeMott’s successor as director of SJSU’s Center for Steinbeck Studies, she introduced previously unpublished Steinbeck works of various kinds in Steinbeck Newsletter and Steinbeck Studies. These included the short story “The Kitten and the Curtain,” “The God in the Pipes”—an early fragment of what became Cannery Row—and an omitted chapter from the novel, “The Day the Wolves Ate the Vice Principal.” She wrote introductions for popular Penguin Classics editions of Steinbeck’s fiction, co-edited John Steinbeck’s America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, and is co-editing a major Steinbeck reference work. Her 25-year record of teaching, editing, and writing was recognized by her designation as SJSU’s President’s Scholar in 2012-13. She is also Scholar in Residence at the National Steinbeck Center and co-director of a summer program on John Steinbeck for high school teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

On Reading “With Your Wings”: African-Americans in John Steinbeck’s Life and Writing in and out of World War II

Susan Shillinglaw’s enlightening comments on the cultural and historical context of John Steinbeck’s World War II character William Thatcher, the African-American hero of the newly published short story “With Your Wings,” are quoted in full:

“This aviator, a second lieutenant with gold bars on his sleeves, would have earned his flight wings in Tuskegee, Alabama, where all African-American pilots were trained during World War II. ‘To have gone through the schools they must be very good, very intelligent and alert,’ Steinbeck writes in Bombs Away, a book-length propaganda piece published in 1942 on assignment for the U.S. war department in which Steinbeck lucidly explains the training of bomber pilots.

‘This aviator, a second lieutenant with gold bars on his sleeves, would have earned his flight wings in Tuskegee, Alabama.’

“Presumably Steinbeck produced ‘With Your Wings’ after writing Bombs Away and following his stint as a war correspondent covering England, North Africa, and a daring diversionary maneuver by Allied forces off the coast of Sicily and southern Italy. It’s tempting to think he wrote his short story after he returned from the front, where he might have encountered the Tuskegee Airmen, the 99th Squadron of the Army Air Forces first posted to North Africa in April 1943—four months before Steinbeck arrived at a ‘North African post,’ as in notes in Once There was a War, a collection of his World War II dispatches. Both Steinbeck and the 99th squadron then went on to Sicily, so it’s quite possible he knew and admired men like William Thatcher in this first African-American squadron posted overseas in World War II.

‘It’s tempting to think Steinbeck wrote his short story after he returned from the front, where he might have encountered the Tuskegee Airmen.’

“This aviator wants to detach from his 16-man group, to go home to ‘get something,’ to think about himself only. ‘He had thought to come home in triumph,’ a hero, a man set apart. But instead, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, he discovers he is a group man, buttressed by family and community and ‘every black man in the world.’ That’s ‘something’ to hang on to.

‘Like Tom Joad, William Thatcher discovers he is a group man, buttressed by family and community and “every black man in the world.”‘

“Steinbeck’s lean little sketch, which reminds me a little of his short story ‘Breakfast,’ relies on sharp details: the aviator’s gold bars, straightness (the men ‘rigid as cypress logs,’ the aviator behind the wheel of his car, the young cotton, the standing community), the sun. It’s such an ordinary scene—except that the man is black, an exemplar because he’s earned those wings.

‘Steinbeck’s lean little sketch relies on sharp details: the aviator’s gold bars, straightness, the sun.’

“Steinbeck created a dignified African-American—Crooks—in his earlier novel Of Mice and Men, made into a movie in 1939. A dignified black man also occupies the lifeboat in another Steinbeck novella—Lifeboat—made into a movie in 1944. In the 1960s Steinbeck wrote about race in a long essay, in a letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Travels With Charley in Search of America, and in his 1966 volume of essays, America and Americans.

‘Steinbeck created a dignified African-American—Crooks—in his earlier novel Of Mice and Men. A dignified black man also occupies the lifeboat in another Steinbeck novella made into a movie.’

“Throughout his career John Steinbeck was deeply concerned with the common good, a phrase I recently heard NEH Director William Adams discussing on the Diane Rehm radio show. Steinbeck’s sense of the common good, I think, had something to do with empathy, humility, and understanding—for all.”

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With:

The Facts about “With Your Wings”—Robert DeMott on An Old John Steinbeck Short Story Recently in the News

November 21, 2014 by 10 Comments

Composite image of Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, and Burgess Meredith

For decades a leading scholar of American literature taught John Steinbeck using a race-themed Steinbeck short story described as lost in news reports on its recent publication by a colorful short story magazine. Printed in The Strand Magazine for the first time since being read on the radio by Orson Welles during World War II, “With Your Wings”—Steinbeck’s inspiring portrayal of a black pilot returning home to the South as a hero—is written in the idealized style of the author’s World War II book, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. But Robert DeMott, Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Ohio University, says that Steinbeck’s short story wasn’t lost—and that Steinbeck’s friend Burgess Meredith, not Orson Welles, probably got first dibs on the story when it was written for broadcast in the 1940s.

John Steinbeck and Orson Welles

According to Andrew Gulli, managing editor of The Strand Magazine, Gulli discovered “With Your Wings” among Steinbeck’s papers at the University of Texas. In his editorial for the current issue of the magazine, Gulli adds that Steinbeck’s very short story about an African-American’s heroic homecoming was recited by Orson Welles on air in 1943 or 1944, then forgotten until it was recovered from the archives at Austin. Gulli’s version of the story’s provenance provides further evidence of Steinbeck’s role as a World War II propagandist. It also suggests that a relationship existed between Steinbeck and Welles, whose classic feature film Citizen Kane is based on William Randolph Hearst, the right-wing publisher of The San Francisco Examiner and The New York Morning Journal who was disliked by Steinbeck and disparaged (though not by name) in The Grapes of Wrath.

Gulli’s version of the story’s provenance provides further evidence of Steinbeck’s role as a World War II propagandist.

As Robert DeMott notes, more documentation is required before inferring a John Steinbeck-Orson Welles relationship from Gulli’s comments. But the possibility is intriguing, particularly in the context of continuing conjecture about Steinbeck’s connection to American intelligence agencies during and following World War II. Citizen Kane was every bit as controversial as The Grapes of Wrath, and for similar reasons. Steinbeck and Welles were celebrated artists with close ties to the Roosevelt administration. More important, they were political progressives who applauded the aims of the New Deal, decried the excesses of capitalism, and distrusted newspaper reviews of their works—though Steinbeck reported briefly on World War II for The New York Herald Tribune, a competitor of Hearst’s that Steinbeck described in private as reactionary.

Steinbeck and Welles were celebrated artists with close ties to the Roosevelt administration.

Co-written, produced, and directed by Welles—who also played the lead—Citizen Kane portrays Hearst, a Californian, as an eccentric empire-builder in the cut-throat world of New York newspaper publishing. Hearst’s papers boycotted the film, and Welles was accused of being a communist or worse even before the picture was released. Steinbeck’s labor novels In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men—made into a 1938 motion picture featuring Burgess Meredith—had provoked a similar reaction when they were written. The publication of The Grapes of Wrath fueled the fire, which had become a conflagration by the time Welles’s movie appeared two years after Steinbeck’s novel.

Writer and Actor Activists in World War II

Like John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith, and other left-leaning writers and actors of the period, Orson Welles devoted his time and talent to the American war effort in Europe and the Pacific. Broadcasting proved particularly effective at boosting morale and providing writers and performers a way to entertain the troops at home and abroad. Welles’s World War II radio broadcasts included guest-hosting four episodes of the popular Jack Benny Program in 1943 and producing and hosting several radio series of his own, including Ceiling Unlimited, the program for which Andrew Gulli says John Steinbeck wrote “With Your Wings.” If true, the assertion raises a possibility of special interest to people who think Steinbeck worked for America’s emerging national security establishment in ways not apparent at the time.

If true, the assertion raises a possibility of special interest to people who think Steinbeck worked for America’s emerging national security establishment in ways not apparent at the time.

According to Wikipedia, Ceiling Unlimited was sponsored by the World War II aeronautical giant Lockheed-Vega Corporation “to glorify the aviation industry and dramatize its role in World War II,” much as Steinbeck’s Bombs Away and “With Your Wings” did for the Air Force pilots who flew the company’s planes. If Steinbeck wrote his short story for Orson Welles, was it at the behest of Lockheed, the California aerospace pioneer founded by two brothers in San Francisco? So far evidence is lacking. Wikipedia doesn’t list Steinbeck among the writers—including Arthur Miller—who contributed to Welles’s radio show. Nor does any reference to Orson Welles, Ceiling Unlimited, or Lockheed occur in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975), Jackson H. Benson’s biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984), or Brian Kannard’s Steinbeck: Citizen Spy.

John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith, and “With Your Wings”

But references to Burgess Meredith abound in the record of John Steinbeck’s life. Like Orson Welles, Meredith achieved success as a New York stage actor before becoming a Hollywood screen star. Steinbeck met Meredith around the time the actor was cast as George in the 1939 movie Of Mice and Men, and the two men hit it off. When MGM refused to let Spencer Tracey narrate the 1941 film version of Steinbeck’s documentary The Forgotten Village, Steinbeck turned to Meredith, whose serene voice was well-suited to Steinbeck’s understated narrative. Like Orson Welles, Meredith and Steinbeck shared a penchant for politics, partying, and multiple partners. For a period they were neighbors, and they remained close until 1958, when a personal quarrel ended their 20-year friendship.

Like Orson Welles, Meredith and Steinbeck shared a penchant for politics, partying, and multiple partners.

Though the John Steinbeck-Orson Welles connection remains conjectural, Steinbeck’s relationship with Burgess Meredith supports Robert DeMott’s version of the “With Your Wings”  back-story. The author of Steinbeck’s Reading (1984; 2007) and Steinbeck’s Typewriter (1996; 2012) and the editor the Library of America’s collection of John Steinbeck’s works, he taught generations of students at Ohio University how to read, write, and think with the depth of reason and empathy required to appreciate Steinbeck, his scholarly specialty. In response to my inquiry about “With Your Wings,” he pointed out that Burgess Meredith knew both Steinbeck and Orson Welles and devoted a chapter to each man in his 1994 memoir, So Far, So Good. Most important, he corrected the claim that “With Your Wings” was lost and raised the possibility that it was written by Steinbeck for Meredith, or for Welles through Meredith. His insights into John Steinbeck’s World War II short story about race in America, the Steinbeck-Welles-Meredith connection, and Steinbeck’s “radical humanism” are quoted in full:

Image of John Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott“I’ve known about the story for several decades and in fact have a Xeroxed copy of it in my files. On occasion I’ve used it in my classes and seminars when talking about Steinbeck and race and it never failed to elicit strong, positive responses from students. The more ‘politically correct’ among them were surprised that a dead white male author could cross racial boundaries like that! The story is on the feel-good side and surely shows Steinbeck’s idealism and patriotism but even at that Steinbeck was nearly alone among his writing peers in responsibly portraying African-American characters at a time when the Armed Services were segregated. Not just the pilot in this story but the character of Joe in Steinbeck’s original narrative treatment of Lifeboat. For me, these characters link up with Steinbeck’s other cast of down-trodden or marginalized characters who people his work of the 1930s and 1940s. So propaganda or not, it seems of a piece with his radical humanism.

“But I did not know about the Orson Welles connection, and while I am happy to learn of that new thread in the carpet I am not entirely convinced that Steinbeck wrote the piece expressly for Welles and/or the Lockheed-Vega Corporation. Recently, James Cummins, a rare-book dealer in New York, offered for sale a typewritten draft of the Steinbeck story as part of a batch of Steinbeck documents in the Burgess Meredith archive. Cummins quotes a letter (ca. 1943) from Steinbeck to Meredith that accompanied the story and in which the author says, ‘A different version of the following was done for overseas broadcast to the troops by O.W.I.’ [Office of War Information], though I am not certain whether that and the Welles broadcast are the same. Steinbeck went on to offer the piece to Meredith for use in his shows, and stressed that it be read like a ‘pure mood’ piece, to be ‘delivered like soft music.’ For what it is worth, I am inclined to believe that the connection between Steinbeck and Meredith on this subject is perhaps more telling and deeper than that between Steinbeck and Welles, and certainly deserving of more investigation.”

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With:

CSU Monterey Bay and National Steinbeck Center Consider Joint Venture in Downtown Salinas, California

October 10, 2014 by 2 Comments

Image of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California
Image of Colleen Bailey, executive director of the National Steinbeck CenterColleen Bailey, executive director of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, reports encouraging new developments for the institution, located at One Main Street, a few blocks from where John Steinbeck lived as a boy. In addition to housing a major Steinbeck archive, the Center features interactive exhibits and rotating exhibitions and sponsors the annual International Steinbeck Festival. A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit membership organization, it operates on grants, gifts, and donated services from individuals, foundations, and other sources. Since opening in 1998, its capacious building has attracted international attention and traffic to Salinas, the largest city in Monterey County.

CSU Monterey Bay in Downtown Salinas, California?

CSU Monterey Bay—part of the California State University system—wants to extend its services eastward to Salinas, located less than a half-hour drive inland from CSU Monterey Bay’s main campus. Created in the mid-1990s during the period in which the National Steinbeck Center was being planned and built, CSU Monterey Bay occupies land in Seaside, California, formerly used by Fort Ord. It offers 23 undergraduate and seven graduate majors to 5,700 students, 37 percent of whom live in Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties.

Under the proposed partnership, CSU Monterey Bay would own the National Steinbeck Center building and the Center would continue to operate at the location. Since 1902-1919, Steinbeck’s time growing up in Salinas, the city has become a majority Mexican-American community known primarily as an agricultural packaging and distribution center. The new corporate headquarters of Taylor Farms—an international distributor of foods, such as lettuce, grown in the Salinas Valley—is nearing completion on Main Street Center next to the Center.

According to Colleen Bailey, negotiations between various Salinas, California, Monterey County, and CSU Monterey Bay governing entities are progressing. At the time of this report, she anticipated discussion of the proposed partnership by the City Council—which also acts as the Salinas, California Redevelopment Agency—as early as next week. She notes that 13 local taxing authorities could benefit from repayment of the Center’s debt to the Salinas, California RDA.

The Red Pony, Bombs Away, and The Wayward Bus

The National Steinbeck Center serves as the custodian of an extensive collection of Steinbeck manuscripts, recordings, and objects acquired through donations to the Salinas, California Public Library that began before Steinbeck died. The collection’s scope, quality, and accessibility to researchers using the Center’s facilities have made it an international resource for Steinbeck scholars who can be found working in Salinas on books and articles about the author at almost any time. Three recent additions reported by Colleen Bailey demonstrate the archive’s extraordinary depth and diversity:

1.        Bombs Away:  The Story of a Bomber Team, Books Digest No. 5 (1942) (21 pages);
2.       The Wayward Bus, final shooting script, Twentieth Century Fox (1956) (122 pages);
3.       The Red Pony, cutting continuity script, Republic Pictures Corporation (85 pages).

For more information about the archive and the 2105 Steinbeck Festival, visit the National Steinbeck Center website.

 

Filed Under: Places & Events, Steinbeck's California Tagged With:

Steinbeck Suite for Organ Published by Zimbel Press

September 19, 2014 by 1 Comment

Cover image of Steinbeck Suite, a new work for pipe organ

Steinbeck Suite for Organ, a new work by the American composer Franklin D. Ashdown, has been published by Zimbel Press. Commissioned in celebration of the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath and in memory of Randall Ray, the five-movement work was premiered by the organ music expert and virtuoso James Welch on the pipe organ of California’s Mission Santa Clara in February 2014. The performance, which can be heard in full here, was recently repeated on a program of organ music related to Steinbeck’s life and writing played by Welch at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Steinbeck’s childhood parish in Salinas. Ashdown’s colorful and dramatic piece is believed to be the only example of organ music written with Steinbeck specifically in mind. Passages from The Grapes of Wrath and Tortilla Flat, Ashdown’s favorite Steinbeck novels, are quoted in headnotes above each movement. According to pipe organ enthusiasts who have heard or played the piece, it is technically challenging but well-suited for use as service organ music on most pipe organs. The 18-minute work is available from Subito Music Corporation.

Filed Under: Music & Media, Steinbeck's Music Tagged With:

Winston Churchill Rolls, George Orwell Rejoices: American Authors Banished from Schools in Great Britain

May 30, 2014 by 6 Comments

Image of Winston Churchill and George Orwell

Winston Churchill is turning in his grave as George Orwell rejoices. John Steinbeck and other American authors, a group deeply disliked by George Orwell, are about to be dropped from Great Britain’s school curriculum. According to “Syal but no Steinbeck in English GSCE,” a BBC news report, English education bureaucrats expressed dismay at discovering that Of Mice and Men remains the most frequently read novel by British middle-school pupils. Henceforth, it is decreed, only British authors can be “taught-to-test” in government-supported schools throughout England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

As an ex-English teacher and Anglophile, I have good cause for hating edicts by education bureaucrats, American or British. Here are 10 reasons why I despise this one with a passion:

1. Winston Churchill’s mother was an American, and America came to England’s aid in its darkest hour, inspired by Winston Churchill’s Anglo-American fortitude and friendship.

2. Most of my ancestors were English immigrants. My father, an Army corporal, was stationed in England. After the war my parents named my brother David Winston (for Winston Churchill, not George Orwell’s Winston Smith). I studied a pair of British authors for my PhD degree and consider George Orwell John Steinbeck’s equal as a writer, a compliment to George Orwell.

3. A disaffected Communist who disdained American authors and refused to visit the United States, George Orwell accused John Steinbeck of being a Soviet sympathizer as the Cold War heated up. Such calumny is to be expected from right-wing British authors who came, saw, and ranted—Evelyn Waugh, for example—but it’s unforgivable in a left-wing journalist like George Orwell who never crossed the Atlantic or questioned Steinbeck to find out for himself.

4. John Steinbeck loved and lauded England and had cherished English roots on his Dickson grandmother’s side. He was a war correspondent in London in 1943 and spent much of 1958 in Somerset, the period his widow Elaine said was the happiest time in their marriage.

5. Steinbeck mined British authors from Thomas Mallory to John Milton in his writing. Unlike George Orwell, he declined to criticize other American authors, at least in public, and as far as I know he gave George Orwell a pass when Orwell said nasty things about the United States.

6. Two classics by George Orwell will be spared in the impending purge of American authors, along with British authors considered too old-fashioned, from English schools; both George Orwell books—1984 and Animal Farm—continue to be taught in American schools, along with masterpieces by older British authors from Shakespeare to Dickens.

7. Winston Churchill, a world-class writer, understood the connection between what one reads and how one thinks. So did George Orwell, despite his parochialism. English students who never read Steinbeck will be as uninformed about the Dust Bowl and Depression as young Americans who never read British authors are about, say, Winston Churchill and World War II.

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Arthur Miller are also Out in English, Welsh, and Irish schools. Henceforth, ideas about America will come from Hollywood, hip hop, and other sources unpolluted by American authors. Future generations in Great Britain can be expected to care as little about our cultural heritage as most Americans care about that of England.

9. Instead, Sherlock Holmes and Meera Syal, the British screenwriter of Bollywood Carmen Live, are now In. This switch is the English equivalent of replacing American authors like Steinbeck and Faulkner with Jerry Seinfeld in American public schools.

10. AQA—the educational bureaucracy that wants to banish American authors from British schools—is short for “Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.” The English equivalent of our SAT Educational Testing Service, the organization frames its ponderous pronouncements in the educational equivalent of George Orwell’s Doublespeak, a sin against meaning in every sense of the word.

In my court, that last offense may be the worst. If you can’t express yourself as clearly as Winston Churchill or George Orwell, you probably aren’t thinking straight. Notwithstanding those British authors unmolested by the ACA, the bureaucrats in Manchester aren’t qualified to banish American authors from any country, least of all Winston Churchill’s glorious land.

Readers are encouraged to submit their own reasons to dislike the idea of dropping John Steinbeck and other American authors from schools in Great Britain. Personal or professional, silly or same—feel free to express your opinion in the Comment space below.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With:

Need Government Shutdown Relief? Read Brian Kannard’s Steinbeck: Citizen Spy

October 17, 2013 by 1 Comment

Cover image shown of the recent book, Steinbeck: Citizen Spy, by Brian KannardThe case for John Steinbeck’s possible connection to the CIA, compellingly presented by literary sleuth Brian Kannard in Steinbeck: Citizen Spy, has been eclipsed by media attention to government shutdown, Washington gridlock, and the national debt-ceiling crisis manufactured by Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz. Too bad. In his new book Kannard provides hard evidence, historical context, and an intriguing hypothesis to explain why John Steinbeck was never called to testify before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) while fellow artists, former collaborators, and personal friends like Arthur Miller were taking the Fifth, naming names, and being blacklisted for standing up to Cruz’s demagogue role-model, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and McCarthy’s acolytes in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The CIA, HUAC, and Government Shutdown of Freedom

It’s enough to make you wish that the government shutdown had happened 60 years ago, when McCarthy was hunting homegrown communists in the Cold War pumpkin patch.

The subtitle of Kannard’s book—“The Untold Story of John Steinbeck and the CIA”—describes the scope and purpose of his deep investigation into redacted (read censored) pre-government shutdown documents reluctantly delivered to him by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. I’m not going to give away the story because it deserves full reading, fair consideration, and frank discussion by Steinbeck lovers everywhere. American progressives owe Kannard a particular debt of gratitude for reopening a shameful chapter in our history, for fighting bureaucratic government shutdown to gain access to undisclosed CIA documents, and for providing a plausible answer to a puzzling question: Did John Steinbeck avoid HUAC by signing up with the CIA?

With the Debt Ceiling Crisis Past, Attention Must Be Paid

Steinbeck’s 25-year paper war with J. Edgar Hoover was first detailed by Thomas Fensch using FBI documents now available online. But Fensch reprinted the redacted contents of Steinbeck’s FBI file without looking for answers to the questions they pose. When I read Fensch’s version, I was struck by the incongruities that motivated Kannard’s research. Wouldn’t the FBI have investigated Steinbeck in advance of the author’s first meeting with FDR, almost five years before Steinbeck’s FBI file begins?  Wasn’t it obvious that the 1942 letter written to Hoover by a Florida farmer accusing Steinbeck of being a potential German spy read like a phony put-up job? Didn’t the CIA’s request for the FBI file on Steinbeck—a Nobel Laureate and New York celebrity—seem odd when it occurred so late in the author’s well-publicized career? Was there was more to Steinbeck’s support of America’s war in Vietnam than loyalty to LBJ? George Orwell thought Steinbeck was a closet communist. Kannard’s evidence suggests the opposite conclusion: Steinbeck was a willing CIA operative in the agency’s covert war against communism as early as 1947.

Sluggish response from scholars to Kannard’s book about a Steinbeck-CIA connection isn’t surprising. The academic ship turns slowly. But continued inattention by the mainstream media—post-Edward Snowden and government shutdown—would be harder to understand. With the debt ceiling and government shutdown crisis over for now, Kannard’s book should receive the coverage it deserves. Steinbeck readers, scholars, and admirers have a stake in the outcome. Personally, I’m okay with the idea that John Steinbeck, a classic New Deal liberal at home, did covert “citizen spy” work for the CIA abroad. I’m not sure that every lover of Steinbeck will agree, but to me the CIA story makes sense without making him a villain. Like Thom Steinbeck, quoted on Kannard’s cover, I look forward to finding out what others think.

Filed Under: Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With:

The Seeds of Death

September 26, 2013 by 1 Comment

genetically-modified-food

Wherever he lived, John Steinbeck kept a garden. He believed that being close to nature and living in harmony with the earth’s ecology was an essential part of being human. What I learned about industrial agriculture on my recent trip through Steinbeck Country would make the author of The Grapes of Wrath spin in his grave.

How My Genetically Modified Food Education Began

Steinbeck—not genetically modified food—was on my mind when we set out for King City, Paso Robles, and San Luis Obispo—our ultimate destination—recently. There, on busy Monterey Street, a used bookstore beckoned with roomfuls of books on every imaginable subject. In the fiction area, high above the ‘S’ authors, hung huge photos of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. A good sign! On the shelf below, between Gertrude Stein and Thomas Steinbeck—nothing. As the store’s manager explained, San Luis Obispo is an ecology-minded, Steinbeck-loving college town. Used copies of anything by Steinbeck are snapped up quickly. An even better sign for our Steinbeck Country weekend!

Monsanto, EPA, FDA, and Global GMO Food Disaster

The store next door had an intriguing name: HumanKind Fair Trade. A handwritten sign by the door described the inventory and promoted the virtues of purchasing Fair Trade certified products. Inside, among colorful fabrics and hand-woven garments, a stack of For A Better World magazines caught my attention. With nothing by Steinbeck to occupy the rest of the trip, I decided to take a copy of the magazine’s special GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) issues for bedtime reading. I didn’t sleep well. I kept thinking about the helicopters overhead on Highway 101 as we made our way south through the lettuce fields surrounding Soledad, Greenfield, and King City. They were spraying pesticides.

How Monsanto, the EPA, and the FDA Collude to Control

At home I watch the news and keep up with current events. I’d heard about the controversy over genetically modified food crops and genetically modified farm animals. But until I read my copy of For A Better World that night in San Luis Obispo, I had no idea that industrial agriculture and Monsanto have colluded successfully to control the world food supply with EPA, FDA, and USDA approval. I began to wonder why the terrifying genetically modified food story isn’t on the news every night. This GMO monster is a menace to global survival, and the battle against Monsanto may be the most important call to action the world faces today. So why are so-called consumer-protection agencies like the EPA, FDA, and USDA staying on the sidelines?

EPA +  FDA + USDA = Former Monsanto Executives, Monsanto Lobbyists, and Monsanto Board Members

Over the past 10 years, seven or more former Monsanto employees have held high-level positions at the FDA. Michael R. Taylor, currently the Deputy Commissioner of the FDA’s Office of Foods, was also Deputy Commissioner for Policy within the FDA in the mid 1990s. Between his last FDA job and his current one, Taylor was Monsanto’s Vice President of Public Policy. As an attorney for Monsanto, he advised the company on the legal implications of using the rBGH hormone on cattle. However, when Taylor left Monsanto for the FDA, he helped write the FDA’s rBGH labeling guidelines—guidelines which promote profits at the expense of public safety. Giant international chemical companies like Monsanto, Dupont, and Dow now effectively control the EPA, FDA, and USDA, helping push patented products—genetically modified food products, herbicides, pesticides, and hormones—past compliant legislators, regulators, and government agencies.

GMO and Roundup–Glyphosate–Are a Time Bomb

Remember Agent Orange, the Monsanto-made defoliant used in Viet Nam to kill nature and people? The company’s latest gift to ecology is glyphosate, the toxin used as a herbicide, which is now marketed worldwide under Monsanto’s friendly brand name Roundup. Here’s how Roundup works: As weeds become resistant to herbicides, genetically modified food crops require the application of more and more chemicals, including glyphosate. Glyphosate has the ability to disrupt soil ecology, effectively killing the earth where it is used. Glyphosate also binds-up soil nutrients, dramatically reducing the nutritional value of crops. Exposure to Roundup in animals has been linked to brain and immune disorders, reproductive problems, cancer, birth defects, diabetes, and more. Independent scientists warn that Roundup toxicity has been grossly underestimated by industry-friendly regulators at the EPA, FDA, and USDA. Instead of protecting the public from the threat of glyphosate toxicity, the EPA recently raised the allowable trace percentage of Roundup in farm-grown foods. You can read about it here.

GMO Food and Glyphosate: Threats to Global Health

Because the EPA, FDA, and USDA have failed to protect us, we have to do it ourselves—starting at the shelves of our local supermarket. Until the fight for mandatory GMO food labeling is finally won, anti-GMO activists advise consumers to buy only organic foods, avoid processed products, and—because you can’t tell from the label—assume that glyphosate is present unless goods are certified as organic. But glyphosate ingestion is only part of the problem with GMO foods. In independent lab tests, rats have developed horrible cancer tumors after being fed Monsanto genetically modified food products. Damage occurs at the molecular level, as the RNA from the GMO product being consumed binds with the RNA in the cells of the animal consuming the GMO. This process permanently changes the DNA of beneficial bacteria in the gut—another danger to bodily health. If you didn’t know better, you’d be right to ask why the EPA, FDA, and USDA haven’t intervened to stop this deadly cycle.

Same Old Story! Genetically Modified Food = Big Money

The United States Patent Office now allows Monsanto to patent organisms, issuing entire portfolios of patents to the company for the GMO seeds and glyphosate herbicide products Monsanto wants to see all over the world. When the company applies for a new patent, Monstanto’s attorneys claim that every GMO innovation is absolutely unique. Yet Monsanto lobbyists take the opposite position when the company petitions the FDA not to impose the GMO food labeling that is mandatory in most countries. With stunning illogic, Monstanto denies that GMO foods are any different from naturally grown products when the issue is labeling, while at the same time claiming that it has the right to patent GMO seeds as proprietary inventions.

Is Genetically Modified Food the Beginning of the End?

Once farmers convert fields to biotech crops like Monsanto’s, there is no turning back. Soil ecology is damaged by the increased application of Roundup. Genetically engineered plants are frequently sterile, so farmers must go back to the company to purchase the seeds and herbicides needed for next year’s crop. Monsanto prohibits farmers from replanting or cultivating their own seeds from patented GMO stock. Meanwhile, genetically modified pollen and seeds are spreading like a virus, carried by the wind to organically farmed fields miles away. The result? GMO pollen and seeds are now polluting organic food crops on neighboring farms, silently and without the affected farmer’s knowledge or approval. The process of contamination doesn’t end there. Glyphosate poison saturates the soil, enters streams, and may ultimately make its way into rivers and oceans. Our ecosystem is in peril today because GMO profiteers are kept in business by the compliance and collusion of EPA, FDA, and USDA officials in bed with Industrial Agriculture. It’s The Grapes of Wrath on steroids.

Act Now! Avoid GMO Foods and Glyphosate Products

Do three things today to help protect yourself from the global menace of genetically modified food and herbicide products:

  1. Google the words GMO, genetically modified foods, Monsanto, Roundup, glyphosate, Michael R. Taylor, EPA, FDA, and USDA.
  2. Pick up a copy of For a Better World and visit websites like Non GMO Project.
  3. Join the upcoming march against Monsanto.

To get a closer look at what ecocide by genetic modification means to you, check out this compelling video. It’s as dramatic as The Grapes of Wrath, except that its subject is the Seeds of Death being sown by Industrial Agriculture on an apocalyptic scale:

Filed Under: Ecology, Featured, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

Route 66 Features Added to Steinbeck Country App

September 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Cascade Lake, Tahoe, photo, a pre-Grapes of Wrath image on Steinbeck Country appThe Steinbeck Country & Beyond app—published by Windy Hill Publications in collaboration with the National Steinbeck Center—has been updated to include new photographs and additional entries about Route 66, the road followed by the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

But the most unusual image added to the app is an historic view of the caretaker’s cabin at Cascade Lake near Lake Tahoe, where Steinbeck completed work on his first novel, Cup of Gold, a decade prior to The Grapes of Wrath. Although the cabin was removed some years ago, the current owners of the property provided the historic black-and-white photograph. Permission to reproduce it in the app was granted by the rights owner, photographer James Hill of Tahoe City, California.

Timed to coincide with the National Steinbeck Center’s upcoming Route 66 road trip along the “mother road and the road of flight” taken by Depression Era migrants to California’s Promised Land, three new entries cover communities along Route 66 described in The Grapes of Wrath. Part I covers Oklahoma; Part II covers Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; and Part III lists California locations mentioned in The Grapes of Wrath.

A free version of the app describing approximately 200 sites worldwide associated with John Steinbeck’s life and work is distributed by Sutro Media through the iTunes App Store. It is also available for Android systems from Google play. For more information visit the app’s website.

Filed Under: Featured, Places & Events, Steinbeck's California Tagged With:

John Steinbeck Publication, Steinbeck Website Reboot

August 16, 2013 by 3 Comments

john-steinbeck-review-3The John Steinbeck publication Steinbeck Review and the Steinbeck website you’re viewing have a new look and new content. Steinbeck Review is now published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in cooperation with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies  at San Jose State University. The Spring 2013 issue, edited by Barbara A. Heavilin and Mary M. Brown, features articles about The Wayward Bus, the metaphor of barbed wire in literature, the influence of UCLA philosopher John Elof Boodin on Steinbeck, the 1942 war treatise by Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck’s Stanford writing teachers Margery Bailey and Edith Mirrielees, the author’s wife Carol Henning, and the banning and celebration of Steinbeck’s works around the world. Effective immediately, searches for johnsteinbeckepiscopalian.org will take viewers to SteinbeckNow.com, a site designed to appeal to readers looking for content relevant to their lives.

Filed Under: Featured, Steinbeck Events Tagged With:
« Previous Page