But already the loner-hobo’s particular kind of plight, with all its venerable associations in American folklore, was being outdated. Where one man had stumped off to try it alone, a family was now in transit; where chance flocks of men had moved across country, now entire communities were travelling, regions on wheels. For the exodus of the Dust Bowl refugees had begun and the main flow was West to California, which, as all the advertisements said, was the Land of the Sun-Down Sea, the state of golden opportunity. Alarmed by the poverty of the new immigrants, the All-Year Club began to advertise: ‘Warning ! Come to California for a glorious vacation. Advise anyone not to come seeking employment.’
Once California’s state slogan was simply: ‘Bring us men who match our mountains’, but in the Thirties even a mountain-sized man had to have fifty dollars to get him and his family over the border; and who had fifty dollars, then?
In three years 350,000 Joads crossed the California line. Hitherto hired hands and croppers in less violent setbacks, when thrust off their plots by rising rentals or falling grain prices or the mergers of farm units, had one by one and quietly faded away ‘into an anomalous and shadowy obscurity’. When the dust storms of the Thirties and the mechanization of agriculture and the financial ultimatums of the banks set tens of thousands adrift on the land, they unintentionally became a shadow lengthening across the broad acres of American agriculture.
It had been braked, for dispossessed rural people can hang on upon their own soil eking out a fringe existence. But when, as in the Thirties, a combination of factors accelerated, a whole population silted up in a ‘distressed rural area’, then as the pressure mounted too high for the capacity of the frail dykes of relief and emergency aid the banks collapsed. Suddenly - apparently - there was ‘rural migration’.
In a word California wanted, has always wanted and still wants, cheap seasonal labour - but a mobile reserve of single, passive, untroublesome ghosts, to be materialized and exorcized with a hey presto, who clear out of town and off the local budget having served their use.
The Dust Bowl refugees were different. They were not floaters. They were heads of families, with bundled up households ready for plumping down wherever permanence offered itself. More than half of those 350,000 went, between 1935 and 1939, straight in the San Joaquin Valley, the agricultural womb of the state. During those years the population of some of the Valley’s twelve counties leaped by fifty per cent, in one instance by seventy per cent.
But the new wave of Neo-Californians rammed into head-on collision with a sophisticated, expertly balanced system. They were a spanner in that delicate mechanism of prices-and-wages maintenance, an ugly sore on the suburban fashion of life, and a resented burden on local fiscal structures when the harvest rush subsided.
Whereupon once again the emotional justifications for victimization flared. In the past there had been regular insurrections by natives against invaders, almost always during times of depression. The natives revolted against the Chinese, once their potential as cut-price labour had been exhausted; later against the Japanese; then against the Mexicans and Filipinos; and once before against their white American kin, against the Missouri ‘pikes’.
There was a tankful of passion to be drawn upon. The Dust Bowlers were quickly metamorphosed into the ‘Migrant Menace’, sub-standard alien creatures threatening Californian standards of living and morality.
There is the inevitable predisposition to see the tragedy of the Thirties slump as having been enacted by those thin hordes plodding from right to left across the vast stage of the Far West, for here was the terror of the average American’s troubles distended into tribal exodus through a wilderness six times greater than Sinai.
The flight of the economic refugees from the Great Plains states was in truth but one instalment of a mass disinheritance when for most Americans the leeway of privation between being in a job and being out of a job was essentially academic. Because a high proportion of those officially tabulated as employed were caught in the drop of thirty-three per cent in average weekly earnings, which meant, in terms of hard money, down to five cents an hour oscillating between idleness and a few days a month on the job.
Louis Filler, looking back on those ‘evil times’, has written: ‘The dullest American who read The Saturday Evening Post and sat through his perishable films, who dreamed of the Big Break and voted for Landon, had no real faith in his own faith. That dull American laid down his body at night in misery and anxiety, and rose at dawn with an oppressive sense of little awaiting him.’
There were more who knew that there was nothing. An anonymous Negro woman, photographed with her little clutter of possessions in the shade of a hoarding on Route 80 near El Paso in June 1938 said: The country’s in an uproar now - it’s in bad shape … Do you reckon I’d be out on the highway if I had it good at home?’
31 They’d toughed it out just as long as they could take it
I bought every kind of machine that’s known -
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers -
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Getting rusted, warped and battered …
Edgar lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology
The main travelled road of that period can be followed today. They left no tracks on the hard surface and the dust which drove them out blew away like them, but this is the tack they tried. You move into the Oklahoma Panhandle through Harper County, and then it is 160 miles of flat road, dead straight but for two kinks, through the middle of the twenty-mile thick sandwich, with the weight of all Kansas above you to the North, the huge slab of Texas below. The groping, dissolved sensation so often experienced on the great curve between the two seaboards - of being a castaway bobbing in a lifebelt in an ocean of land - assists in recreating mentally the experience of those fugitives of thirty years ago.
Eventually Highway 64 dips across the Oklahoma state line into New Mexico, with an alternative right fork at Boise City up into Colorado. For those 160 miles you drive through the scraped brown country of Beaver, Texas and Cimarron Counties. This was the Dust Bowl, the wellhead of the great anabasis of the Thirties. At any rate, the Panhandle served a public purpose as the dramatic focal point.
The Okies, the desperate ‘casualties of change’, crawling along the thirty-seventh parallel toward the Californian mirage in their pageant of junkyard cars, trading pans and furniture for petrol en route, became a symbol. In fact, their disaster was one which had similarly struck farming populations in a far broader realm and for a far greater span of time than just that place and period spotlit by Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Oklahoma has not one natural lake. Since the Depression years reservoirs and flood-control systems have been built. Now the Panhandle is flecked with the silver of artesian wells and metal windmills. Now there is an ingrafted pattern of strip-cropping, and the roots and stems of sorghum knit together the light sandy soil.
Despite these repairs the land still has a beaten and finished-with look. It is treeless but for scraggy clumps set for weather shields around an occasional farmhouse. Sometimes there is to be seen far off the jutting gothic battlements of a grain elevator.
In daytime harriers drift across the infinite singed landscape. Small brilliant sunflowers smear the road verges; land turtles plod across the hot concrete and locusts the size of wrens on their outspread yellow vanes zoom down wind. A distant tractor ploughing the skyline flies a flag of grey dust. Otherwise there is little colour or movement. Sound ? The unceasing scuffling rasps of sterns and grasshoppers, a great pan of bacon frying.
In summer the creeks and river forks are baked fissures, quite empty and hard. There seem to be as many abandoned as occupied houses: weedpatch skeletons of timber, bleached grey and brittle as brandysnap by the sun. The farmer you now and then pass could be Pa Joad, gaunt, bristle-chinned, brown as meerschaum, in a slouch hat and bib dungarees over blue work shirt.
T
his is from where the Joads and the other forty-acre tenant ‘croppers were blown out or tractored out by the banks and the finance companies foreclosing. You feel, as you stare ahead along the road and the unreeling changelessness of land and sky, spreading without end, killingly monotonous and without anchorage for eye or mind, that small wonder the Okies and the Arkies got the hell out of such country, and you marvel that they ever came in here voluntarily and tried to stay, to limpet on to the frail top soil which they were cutting out from under them by their hasty, clumsy deep ploughing.
On the drive you begin, then, to see vestiges of the reason why they were blown off the land and in all directions by the winds which carried fogs of dust so black that lamps had to be burned all day through. There are still patches of dunes at the roadside, some scantily whiskered with grass, others bare and still creeping and realigning themselves in new perfect piles against fence posts and hillocks.
Despite the first aid - the irrigation, the Soil Conservation Agency tree-girdles, the enforced recovery of prairie and grazing pasture from the depleting crops of cotton and wheat - this is still sad, dilapidated country, threadbare as the patched overalls on a farm hand, its texture rubbed through.
H. M. Ives began working as an agricultural officer here in 1934. Now he is district agent-at-large for the U.S. Agricultural Extension Service, operating from a department of Oklahoma State University at Stillwater.
‘It still blows,’ he says. ‘There was some rather serious blowing up in Cimarron County, below Boise City, this winter and in Grant and Alfalfa Counties. Some of the farmers flooded their land prior to seeding time, but there was still some blowing and fresh sanding around there.
‘Of course up to 1907 this country had never been touched by a tool. The Panhandle of Oklahoma was Indian no-man’s-land. They fought each other everywhere else but there was a gentlemen’s agreement that they peacefully used that part as common hunting ground where they got the meat for the tribes, the antelope and buffalo.
‘Even after it was settled and the cropping began, the dust conditions weren’t bad everywhere: it depended on the soil type. Where the light sandy soil had been cut up by the plough there was often total blowout or at least bad duning; but in other parts the heavier adobe clay stood out not too bad during the drought.
‘Yes, round here it was Cimarron County, and Dalhart in Texas, where it was really badly scoured-out. That’s where the dust conditions were especially bad. Cimarron County went seven years without a crop because of the drought of 1932 to 1939, when they began to get a little bit of a crop again.
‘The Federal Government programme reduced the amount of grain to be grown, and ranchers used the money granted under the Range Program to impound water and drill wells, planning it out so that cattle would never have to walk more than a mile to water of some kind.
‘But a lot of the people in the Dust Bowl hadn’t that kind of knowledge or resource. You needed at least a three-year cushion to carry you through. It’s country that in a cruel way took it out of a man, but there were some who toughed it out. We had plenty of awful hardy people out there. A lot went, and it was the hardiest of the hardy who were left.
‘It wasn’t felt that the people who got out were quitters. Of course some people give up easier than others. A lot of them hadn’t been out there too long. They’d heard about the big crops that could be raised in the good weather patterns, but they arrived just in time for the drought. They didn’t have time to get started or dug in.
‘They just, in the end, told the banks “You go out there and salvage what you can, but I’ve given enough of my life to it.” They were strangers to the land. Most of those who stayed knew the country. The trouble for those who toughed it out was that they often had to contend with the blowing from the land around, where people had pulled out, and they certainly did wish that they’d stayed and stabilized their land. Often a man had to spread out on to the abandoned land and put down a sorghum crop to hold it, with the result that the man sticking on had a terrible amount of work on his hands to protect himself.
‘So there was some feeling about those who went. All the same, everyone was pretty philosophical. Maybe some of them thought that they’d get out too if they knew how.
‘It was from the Panhandle that the big out-migration went but not all of them headed for California. A lot retracked back East into the central state, returned to places they’d come from, where they could fish and get some kind of a living, or moved in with relatives where they were familiar with the country.
‘I remember seeing them going out West on Route 270 which was just a dirt road then, and coming back on Highway 64. They were in broken-down jalopies and old farm trucks that’d just about run, piled with what belongings they’d got left but no livestock, because that had all died off.
‘They were worse than broke, if that’s any indication. They were desperate. They’d toughed it out just as long as they could take it.
The Panhandle has never been repopulated up to the level it was before the exodus. It’s more thinly farmed now than before the Thirties although that’s because some of the men who stood out there and fought through began to pull together additional land, to take over the units too small to be farmed economically. As a matter of fact, we had a more serious drought situation in the Fifties, more concentrated than the longer period, but the man with the irrigation wells coasted through. In the Thirties most of those little people just didn’t have a hope.’
*
The small-town businessman also stuck out the drought of his spiritual faith for an amazingly long time after the crash: the Depression hadn’t happened. That overwrought looking-on-the-bright-side anxiety was behind the newspaper editorial declaring that ‘many a family that has lost its car has found its soul’, a sentiment amplified by the President of Notre Dame University who, counting the nation’s blessings pointed out that a result of the Depression was that ‘a great portion of the American public rediscovered the home, rediscovered fireside joys, rediscovered the things of the spirit’.
This was all part of the ‘live at home’ movement of the time, but which failed to recruit the scores of thousands who were beginning to shuffle away from those fireside joys, to try to escape from the claustrophobia of poverty which was everywhere, suffocating as the dust swirling through the rainless weeks and months.
Yet they were in no sense new on the American scene. The auto migrants of the Thirties were no more bitterly off - assuredly less so - on their journey than the handcart Utah pioneers of the 1860s who pushed their two-wheel carriages loaded with luggage across a thousand miles of rough trail in three months, wife and children in train, to the ‘Valley’ which was the lodestar, and many died of cold and starvation before they got there. Nor were the Okies as pressed by poverty and hardship as the families who forced through to the West in horse-drawn covered wagons.
But there were two important differences. The earlier voyagers knew that if they stuck it out land awaited them, a place to build a home. The Okies started out from necessity, not sheer nerve, and they knew in their hearts that they had been beaten to it in the carve-up of the natural wealth ahead. Also fearsome though the earlier travail was, it was an honourable and admired enterprise, whereas the Okies were mendicants, rubbish swilling along the gutters of American life.
It was the car which gave them an identical course of action and legibility for, as the Walsh Industrial Relations Commission pointed out in 1915, there would at that time have been mass migration from Oklahoma - given the transportation. But nor were starved-out drought refugees, as a special category of emigres, a peculiarity of 1915 and the Thirties.
The Great Plains states - the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico - were substantially settled in the forty years between 1870 and 1910, although this only in the sense of the slicing up of the booty, not investment of it. Since the beginning the flux and swapping of populations have continued to the present day
at as impetuous a rate, a swooping in when the weather cycle is benign, a scrambling-out when the rains fail.
Before 1850, although the pioneers with the sights set on the boundless abundance of the West - the Beulah Land of the hymns which supported them on their journeys - threaded through the Great Plains, it was not until the decade between 1850 and i860 that some began to halt short or deliberately opt for this region.
Like all the early Westerners these first home-builders on the Plains were cosmopolitan. The Eighth Census of the United States of i860 shows that the population of Kansas in that year included persons born in every state and in twenty-eight foreign countries, ninety per cent of the 107,000; yet twelve per cent were natives of Missouri, and more than fifty per cent were born no farther east than Ohio.
This patently was short-hop settlement and until 1850 little attempt was made to hack out a living west of the ninety-sixth meridian, the vertical line which cuts through the present cities of Lincoln and Beatrice in Nebraska, Topeka and Coffeyville in Kansas and Gainesville and Houston in Texas. Those who had ventured out so far clung to the partially timbered areas and the river valleys. By 1860 the population of these ten states was 873,000, with ninety-two per cent in Texas, Kansas and New Mexico, and seventy per cent in Texas alone, and the remaining eight per cent dribbled throughout Colorado, Nebraska and the Dakota Territory. By 1890 that total had quadrupled.
But this was not a tapestry of steadily thickening design. Already the turnabout and desertion had begun. For large numbers their reception in the country of big skies was drought and a malevolent sun. While the remainder of Oklahoma was being opened to the piling weight of those spilled over from the East’s economic troubles, simultaneously many who had only just about hammered in their rail posts and cleared the scrub were being roasted out. Homesteads and cabins, trimly new, were abandoned; fields rippling with their first furrows were left to be combed back into blankness by the winds. Their vigour clubbed down, their hopes shrivelled, the vanguard retreated from Montana and Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado; 114 counties in Western Kansas and Western Nebraska were almost emptied; some areas were forsaken altogether. The population of Omaha and Nebraska tumbled by 37,000.
Hard Travellin Page 36
