Help Wanted

Roadside help-wanted signs provided an important means of communication from potential employers to the migrant agricultural workers. After long journeys, a sign by the side of a road could signal to migrants and refugees that work may at last be found. Steinbeck describes such a scene in The Grapes of Wrath: 

“Al turned right on a graveled road, and the yellow lights shuddered over the ground. The fruit trees were gone now, and cotton plants took their place. They drove on for twenty miles through the cotton, turning, angling on the country roads. The road paralleled a bushy creek and turned over a concrete bridge and followed the stream on the other side. And then, on the edge of the creek the lights showed a long line of red boxcars, wheelless; and a big sign on the edge of the road said, ‘Cotton Pickers Wanted.’ Al slowed down” (403).