Climate change;

After The Fact – The Art of Historical Detection, Volume II Sixth Edition
By James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle
Chapter 12 – Dust Bowl Odyssey
Who were the millions who flooded into California during the depression?  The census makes the invisible more visible.

The story begins with dust — not the thin coating on the shelf or the little balls in the corner, but huge dark clouds of it. When the winds blew, they sucked the dust

into the sky to create blizzards. The dust storms began in earnest on May 9, 1934. High winds captured dirt from Montana and Wyoming — some 350 million tons of it—and

carried it eastward. By noon the dust began falling in Iowa and Wisconsin. That evening a brown grit fell like snow on Chicago — four pounds for each inhabitant. Then

the storm moved on. It was dark in Buffalo at noon the next day and the midday gloom covered five states. On May 11 the dust sifted down as far south as Atlanta and as

far north as Boston. The following day, ships some 300 miles off the east coast noticed a film of brown dust on their decks.

Every year more storms blew: twenty-two in 1934, to a peak of seventy-two by 1937, then a gradual decline until finally the rains returned in the 1940s. Residents of

the high western plains remembered 1935 as the worst year. February brought temperatures in the seventies. With no snow cover and no vegetation to hold it, the dirt

flew. Even on calm days on the Southwestern plains a pervasive grit fell everywhere. “In the morning,” John Steinbeck wrote, “the dust hung like fog, and the sun was

as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down … It settled on the corn, piled on the tops of the fence posts,

piled on the wires; it settled on roofs and blanketed weeds and trees.” On May 15 Denver sent a warning that a dust storm was rolling eastward. Folks in Kansas under a

clear blue sky paid little attention until around noon when the sky suddenly blackened. One movie patron leaving a theater expected to walk into the blinding glare of

daylight. Instead he thought a prankster had thrown a bag over his head. As he stepped outside, he bumped into a telephone pole, tripped over cans and boxes, and

finally found his way by crawling along the curb. A young boy was less fortunate. He wandered out the door, became disoriented, and suffocated in a dust drift.

No matter what they tried, people could not escape the dust. Open the door and the dust beat in your face. Shut the door tight and still “those tiny particles seemed

to seep through the very walls. It got into cupboards and clothes closets; our faces were as dirty as if we had rolled in the dirt; our hair was gray and stiff and we

ground dirt between our teeth.”

Was this the wrath of God, as some plains dwellers thought? “This is the ultimate darkness,” one woman wrote in her diary. “So must come the end of the world.” Still,

though the story of the Dust Bowl remains one of the saddest chapters in American history, its coming could be explained by causes more proximate than divine wrath.

Drought had been a recurring fea¬ture of the high plains that stretched northward from the Texas panhandle, New Mexico, and western Oklahoma all the way through

portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. To survive extremes of heat and cold, wind and drought, prairie grasses had developed deep roots.

Those grasses fed the buffalo and held the soil in place.

In the late nineteenth century farmers had seen the grass as a nuisance to be plowed under so they could exploit the rich soil beneath. Land that had been suitable

enough for grazing was turned into fields of cotton, wheat, and corn. Little did farmers heed the warning of those who described the area as the “Great American

Desert,” subscribing instead to the popular notion that “rain follows the plow.” Homestead farmers sought to create an agrarian kingdom in which they “busted” and

“broke” the land into farms to feed their families, the nation, and the world.

In 1934, when the dust storms arrived in the midst of the Great Depression, the ensuing disaster shattered the dreams of a people who had always seen the West as the

land of opportunity. The rains failed them, their crops withered, and the winds hurled the loose soil across the nation. As the soil eroded year after year, so did

farmers’ resources and hopes.

That story was the one that John Steinbeck presented in his novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and that director John Ford turned into one of the most critically acclaimed

movies of all time. Most Americans now associate the depression era with the “Okies” — dispossessed farm families out of Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states — and

their rickety cars packed high with all they owned, heading along Route 66 to California. Whether in Steinbeck’s words, in Ford’s images, in the ballads of folk singer

Woody Guthrie, or in the pictures taken by Farm Security Administration photographers like Dorothea Lange, the “Okies” and their flight from the Dust Bowl put a face

on the tragedy of America during the Great Depression.

Steinbeck’s novel told of the Joad family in a near biblical parable of suffering, endurance, and dignity in the face of adversity. The name Joad echoes the name Job,

and the voice of God comes through the Reverend Jim Casy, whose initials link him to Jesus Christ. The Joads’ trek across the desert to the promised land reminds us of

Israel’s lost tribes. It is a compelling story with three major sections: the opening in Oklahoma, in which the Joads are driven from their land; their odyssey across

the desert on Route 66; and their journey through California in a desperate search for work.

The Joads are a simple family who for decades struggled to wrest a living cropping cotton on a forty-acre plot near Sallisaw, Oklahoma. At first there were five years

of good crops “while the wild grass was still in her.” Then it became an “ever’ year” kind of place. “Ever’ year,” Tom Joad told his friend Jim Casy, “we had a good

crop comin’ an’ it never came.” Bad crops forced the Joads to borrow from the bank. The crops kept failing, the debt kept growing, and soon the bank owned their farm.

The Joads, along with hundreds of thousands of plains farmers, became sharecroppers who each year gave the better part of their crop to a landowner or the bank. When

Tom Joad returns home after a stint in prison, he finds his family gone. His friend Muley Graves explains that they have been driven from their farm: “they was gonna

stick her out when the bank come to tractorin’ off the place.” The tractor that leveled the farm house also severed the vital connection between the Joads and their

land. They were almost literally uprooted and displaced.

Now the question became where to go. In the 1930s California beckoned more than any other destination. The agrarian dream of economic sufficiency and independence

still glittered in the West. So the Joads piled all their worldly goods and a family of twelve onto a jalopy and headed down Route 66. Steinbeck described the highway

as

the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the numbers of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion,

from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what richness is there. From all of these the people

are in flight.

The road proves a cruel taskmaster. Each repair of their weather-beaten auto eats into the Joads’ shrinking cash reserve. The weaker members of the family die or

wander off. In the roadside camps, however, the Joads often meet other refugees who give help and comfort, share what little they have, and join the Joads in

reestablishing ties to the places they have left behind. In California the dream turns into a nightmare. The Joads do indeed discover the land of milk and honey. Rich

farms and fertile fields roll across a vast landscape. Yet that abundance is off limits to the Okies. Californians treat them like vermin, vigilante mobs attack them,

labor agents cheat them, strike breakers threaten them, and worst of all, work at a living wage proves nearly impossible to find. Unable to provide, the men lose their

place at the head of the family. In the end Ma Joad’s faith holds the remnants of the family together, but in a final irony these Dust Bowl refugees face the peril of

rising floodwaters.

THE SPECIFIC VERSUS THE COLLECTIVE
Many Americans come away from the Joads’ story convinced that Steinbeck recorded the central tragedy of America in the 1930s. Yet no single story, however powerful or

popular, can capture the collective experience of hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. A historian wants to know just how typical were the Joads — of

Americans, of migrants to California, or even simply of Okies during the Great Depression. After all, Steinbeck was a novelist seeking to tell a story of people

dispossessed from the land. Unlike a historian, he was not bound by strict rules of evidence and explanation, only by the true expression of the human condition. Yet

Steinbeck gained the respect of his readers in part because he based much of his novel on direct observation. Like many writers of the 1930s he used a reporter’s

techniques to research his story, visiting Oklahoma, traveling Route 66, and touring California’s migrant labor camps.

Social scientists and government officials of Steinbeck’s day confirmed much of what he wrote. They too reported the drought conditions that drove farm families out of

the plains, the hostility of Californians to refugees, and the destitution of many migrants. Yet we have already seen that the historian must rigorously question the

testimony of social scientists and journalists as much as novelists. Even the apparently objective photographs taken by that “mirror with a memory” need to be

scrutinized.

Take, for example, the case of photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband, Paul Taylor, an agricultural economist from the University of California at Berkeley. Like

Steinbeck, Lange and Taylor followed the migrant trail from Oklahoma through Texas and across the desert to the migrant camps in California. Lange was one of many

photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document rural life in the 1930s. She and Taylor published a book, ‘Art American Exodus: A Record of

Human Erosion’, that described the destruction of the plains and the impoverishment of a proud people. Yet Taylor and Lange were hardly disinterested observers — much

to their credit, one can argue. Like Steinbeck, they believed that the migrants needed help. And all three went looking for evidence to make that case.

The story of Lange’s most famous photograph is instructive. One March morning in 1936 she was driving up California Highway 101 toward San Francisco. Eager to be home,

she hurried past a hand-painted sign directing passersby to a pea-pickers’ camp. Some impulse made her turn back. What she saw staggered her, even though she had spent

months investigating the conditions of migrant farm laborers. The camp contained more than two thousand men, women, and children huddled against the cold and driving

rain in ragged tents and flimsy wood shelters. They had come to pick peas, but the weather left them without work or wages. And with nowhere to go and no relief from

local, state, or federal officials, they waited. First their money ran out, then their food. By the time Lange arrived they were desperate. How was she to give voice

to their need?

That day Lange took a photograph that must rank as one of the most widely viewed images of the decade. She entitled it “Migrant Mother.” Her subject’s name was

Florence Thompson, at age thirty-two the recently widowed mother of six children. What Lange captured was the quiet dignity of a woman at the end of hope, cradling an

infant in her arms with two young children clinging to her shoulders. She had just sold the tires off her car to buy food for her family. As Lange intended, the image

put a personal face to a need so compelling, few people could turn away. Along with Steinbeck’s tale of the Joads, “Migrant Mother” made Americans aware of the story

of the dust bowl refugees.

Lange and other FSA photographers did not simply arrive at a camp and begin taking pictures. To get the image she wanted, Lange often posed her subjects. She sometimes

even suggested to them where to look or what to do with their hands. In the case of Florence Thompson, Lange recalled, “she seemed to know that my pictures might help

her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.” Lange took six different photographs, each time looking for a more compelling shot. In the first,

one child was smiling at the camera, defusing the desperation of the situation. Lange then tried a longer view of the tent; then moved in to focus on the mother and

her baby. In the final, telling shot, Thompson, of her own accord, raised her hand to her chin. “LOOK IN HER EYES,” ran the headline in ‘Midweek Pictorial’ when it

first ran the photo. “This woman is watching something happen to America and to herself and her children who are part of America.”

Both Lange and Steinbeck adopted the time-tested literary technique of allowing a part to stand for the whole. The two created images so vivid, stories so concrete,

they would be remembered long after the bland generalizations of bureaucratic reports were forgotten. Yet here, in the matter of the concrete and the specific, is

precisely where historians so often begin their skeptical cross-examinations. One way of identifying biases or limiting perspectives is to examine a broader sample. To

what degree are Steinbeck’s vivid stories and Lange’s wrenching photographs representative of the collective reality they are taken to symbolize?

Even a casual glance at the Joads’ story suggests that Steinbeck painted with a broad, sometimes imprecise brush. To begin with, the Joads did not live in what was

physically the Dust Bowl. While drought affected a vast region from the Dakotas to Texas, geographers place the Dust Bowl in an area in the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle

that spills over into western Kansas and eastern parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Sallisaw, from which the Joads hailed, lay in the eastern part of the state, several

hundred miles outside the dust bowl. Rolling hills and oaks, not prairie and short grasses, formed the landscape. And corn rather than cotton was the primary crop. As

one historian remarked, “Steinbeck’s geography, like that of most Americans, was a bit hazy; any place in Oklahoma, even on the Ozark Plateau, must be Dust Bowl

country, he assumed.”

Still, this point seems a small one, given the wide reach of those rolling black clouds. Even if the Joads were not technically from the Dust Bowl, surely most of the

Okies who migrated to California were farm refugees from the dust storms. Or were they? Here, too, the facts get in the way of the image Steinbeck made popular.

Statistics show that California gained more than a million new residents in the 1930s. In fact, however, no more than about fifteen thousand to sixteen thousand of

those people came from the Dust Bowl — well under 2 percent. In imagining the Joads, Steinbeck was implicitly portraying a much broader group of Southwestern emigrants

from four states: “agricultural laborers” and “farm workers” not only from Oklahoma but also Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri. Because this group amounted to about one-

third of the newcomers to California, we might say that, strictly speaking, the Joads are more accurately representative of displaced agricultural labor than of Dust

Bowl refugees.

The minute we begin talking about collective experiences, of course, we run headlong into numbers. To understand the great migration of the depression decade,

historians must place the Joads in a statistical context. What links them to the million people who reached California between 1930 and 1940? Unfortunately, the mere

mention of numbers — statistics or columns of figures — is enough to make the eyes of many readers glaze over. It is only natural to prefer Steinbeck’s way of

personifying the Dust Bowl refugees.

Yet the numbers cannot be avoided if we are to paint an accurate picture. The challenge for the historian lies in bringing statistics to life so they tell a story with

some of the human qualities that Lange and Steinbeck invested in their subjects. In looking at the 1930s in particular, historians are lucky because social scientists

and government officials tried hard to quantify the human circumstances of the era. In particular, historians of the Dust Bowl era have been able to benefit from the

federal population count of 1940, which was the first modern census.

The federal census had been taken every decade since 1790, because its data was needed to apportion each state’s seats in the House of Representatives, in accordance

with the provisions of the Constitution. For the first fifty years federal marshals did the actual counting, by locating households within their districts and

recording the number of people living there. Over time the nature of the information collected became broader and more detailed; it included social statistics about

taxes collected, real estate values, wages, education, and crime. In 1880 Congress shifted responsibility for the census from the marshals to specially appointed

experts trained to collect not only population statistics but also data on manufacturing and other economic activities. By 1890, punch cards were being used to record

data and an electric tabulating machine was used to process those cards. Mechanization, by vastly reducing calculation time, made it possible to accumulate more

complex and varied information.

The census of 1940, because of advanced statistical techniques used by the enumerators, was even more comprehensive than its predecessors. Social scientists and

opinion pollsters like George Gallup had experimented during the 1930s with probability sampling. To measure unemployment rates in 1940, for example, they constructed

a group of some 20,000 households to represent a cross section of the nation as a whole. The data from this small sample gave the social scientists statistics that

accurately (though not exactly) reflected the national employment pattern. Other questions in the 1940 census were asked of just 5 percent of the households. That

allowed the Census Bureau to publish detailed tables on many more subjects, not the least of which was internal migration. In so doing, they provided historians with a

way of determining how representative the Joads actually were of the Dust Bowl refugees.

HISTORY BY THE NUMBERS
Historian James Gregory went to the census records in his own attempt to analyze the Dust Bowl migration. In each of the censuses from 1910 to 1970, he was able to

find statistics on Americans born in western regions of the South (Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas) who had moved to California. By comparing these numbers

decade to decade, he could also estimate how many new Southwesterners arrived every ten years. Take a moment to look at the table below.

The story of the Joads would lead us to hypothesize that between 1930 and 1940 a large number of migrants left the Southwestern plains states for California. Drought

and economic hardships drove them out. Because so many settled in California, we would further assume that conditions special to that state drew the refugees there.

At first glance, the statistics support the hypothesis. The number of Southwesterners in California in 1940 is 745,934. Subtracting the residents that were already

there in 1930 (430,810) we discover that some 315,124 Southwesterners moved to California during the decade in which the severe dust storms took place (this number is

shown for 1940 in “Net California Increase”). Of course, there is a certain false precision here. Common sense tells us that at least some Southwesterners living in

California who were counted in the 1930 census must have returned home, moved to an entirely new state, or died over the next ten years. In that case, the actual

number of migrants arriving must have been greater, though we have no reliable way of knowing how much greater. But the bureau has estimated that the total number of

Southwestern emigrants might have been as many as 400,000. In other words, the number in our table — 315,124 — may have been off by 85,000 people, enough to populate a

medium-sized city.

A migrant total approaching half a million is surely high. But we must ask another question. Is there a causal connection between the drought and migration, or is the

link merely coincidental? The anecdotal evidence of one journalist suggests an intriguing clue. He reported seeing Oklahoma farmers “in their second-hand flivvers

[inexpensive Model-T Fords], piled high with furniture and family . . . pouring through the divides by the hundreds.” It is the kind of literary detail that might have

come straight out of Steinbeck. The problem is that the reporter was writing in 1926, eight years before the first dust storm. We begin to see the reason that James

Gregory, in compiling his table, sought data over a sixty-year period. The broader time span provides a better yardstick of comparison. To make the point visually, we

have taken the information from the “Net California Increase” column and displayed it as a bar graph.

As the bar graph reveals, during the 1920s nearly a quarter of a million Southwesterners migrated to California — nearly as many as came during the “dirty thirties” of

the Dust Bowl years. Small wonder that a reporter could speak, in 1926, of hundreds of flivvers crowding the mountain passes. And the 1920s, by contrast, were years of

average rainfall. Equally notable, the number of arrivals virtually doubles during the 1940s, a time when rain and better economic times had returned to the region,

mostly because of massive industrial growth stimulated by World War II. Even in the postwar decade of 1950-1960, the migration of Southwesterners remained heavy. Such

numbers suggest that factors besides drought, dustbowls, and depression were driving people from the Southwestern plains or drawing them to California.

Steinbeck’s powerful imagery provides one suggestion for explaining this broader trend: the tractor that knocked down the Joads’ house. Why, we might ask, were

tractors rumbling across the farmland, driving people from their homes? Steinbeck offered an explanation: “At last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system

won’t work any more. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop.” The owners took no responsibility

for what they and their tractors did. It was “the bank” that gave the order, and the bank was “something more than men. . . . It’s the monster. Men made it, but they

can’t control it.” When the tenants protest that their families had “killed the weeds and snakes” to make way for their farms, the owners show cold indifference. “The

bank, the fifty-thousand acre owner, can’t be responsible,” they explain. “You’re on land that isn’t yours.” When the tenants complain that they had no money and

nowhere else to go, the owners respond, “Why don’t you go to California? There’s work there and it never gets cold.”

The tractor is a symbol for a complex process of agricultural reorganization through absentee landownership, mechanization, and corporatizing. During the late

nineteenth century farmers had flooded into the Southwestern plains — the nation’s final agricultural frontier. Through World War I they realized generally high prices

for their crops. All the same, many farmers had arrived with few resources other than the labor they and their families could perform. One bad crop, one dry year, and

they were facing debt. Once in debt, they had to buy on credit and borrow on future crops. As a result, sharecropping and tenantry had become widespread even in flush

times.

During the 1920s, though industry boomed, the agricultural economy went into decline. Prices for agricultural staples like cotton, wheat, and corn fell. Overfarming

depleted the soil. Such factors created conditions under which too many people were trying to farm land that could no longer support them. Between 1910 and 1930, well

before the great dust storms, the number of farmers and agricultural workers in the region fell by about 341,000 and some 1.3 million people left. About 430,800

settled in California. A majority of the farmers who remained in the region rented land or cropped on shares. By the 1930s, landowners had come to realize that they

could increase profits by driving off their tenants, by consolidating their acreage into larger, more efficient farms, and by using tractors and other machines rather

than human labor.

So the explanation for the exodus from the plains would need to include a discussion of agricultural reorganization and the mechanization of farming. Steinbeck’s vivid

portrait of the bankers’ tractors acknowledged this reality, but the novel’s pervasive images of dust overwhelms it somewhat. These findings do not mean we should

dismiss ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, merely that we should study the numbers on migration a little more closely. Were those migrants who left between 1910 and 1930 the same

kinds of people who left in the 1930s? Did they leave for the same reasons?

Because the 1940 census was so much more comprehensive than those that preceded it, we actually know more about the Dust Bowl-era migrants than about those who

traveled in previous decades. The 1930 census tells us, for example, that rural counties in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas lost population in the 1920s, but not

whether people left the region. Many may have gone into the cities or to work in the booming oil fields. All the same, it seems most likely that the migrants of the

1920s were a more prosperous group than those of the next decade. Despite the popular image of the West as a “safety valve” for the poor from the East, over the course

of American history the majority of pioneer farmers were neither rich nor poor. The West attracted largely middle-class folk drawn to the promise of economic

opportunity rather than driven out by harsh circumstances.

Elbert Garretson seems representative of the middling sort of people making up migrants before the Great Depression. Garretson saw that lower crop prices and declining

soil fertility had weakened his chances to succeed at farming. So he packed up his family and took a job in a California steel mill. His plan was to get on his feet

financially so he could continue to farm in Oklahoma. Several times the Garretsons returned to Oklahoma, but each time the lure of California proved stronger. Finally

Garretson sold the farm as a bad bet.

During the 1920s the lure for migrants was even stronger because California farmers faced a shortage of agricultural labor. To attract workers, they often paid

railroad fares of Southwesterners who would emigrate. “The farmers would meet you at the trains,” one woman recalled. Another family went “because we could see the

promise of the cotton future here, and we were cotton ranchers.” Poorer people like the Joads surely felt the draw too, but they were more likely tied by debt to their

“ever’ year” farms.

What differed in the 1930s was not so much the numbers of those who went but their identities. Of all the regions of the United States, none suffered more economic

devastation during the Great Depression than the Southwest plains. The once-robust oil industry collapsed in a glut of overproduction. Unemployment in the region hit

one-third of all workers. Infestations of locusts and boll weevils added to the woes of farmers long afflicted by drought and low crop prices. In the two years before

Franklin Roosevelt became president, creditors foreclosed the mortgages of some 10 percent of Oklahoma’s farms. As a result, the migrants of the 1930s included many

more desperately poor and displaced families like the Joads.

When Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal in 1933, he placed the agricultural crisis at the top of his agenda. Still, it was far from clear what government could

do to ease the farmers’ plight. One of the New Deal’s most ambitious measures during the president’s Hundred Day program for relief, recovery, and reform was the

Agricultural Adjustment Act. New Dealers sought to ease farm distress by providing credit, reducing overproduction, and raising prices. One strategy was to offer

farmers a cash subsidy to take land out of production. Over the next eight years desperate Southwestern farmers so eagerly sought the subsidy that they reduced their

cotton acreage by 12.5 million acres, or more than 50 percent.

This strategy contains one of the central ironies of the Dust Bowl crisis. Along with the drought and the “monster” bank, the good intentions of the federal government

helped to account for the wave of tractors driving people like the Joads from their land. To receive a crop subsidy, landowners had to reduce the acreage they planted.

The easiest way to do that was to evict tenants. Landowners could consolidate their best lands and farm them with tractors while letting tenant lands return to grass.

One landlord boasted that “I bought tractors on the money the government give me and got rid o’ my renters.” So common was that practice that by 1940 tenantry had

decreased by 24 percent. “They got their choice,” the same landlord remarked curtly. “California or WPA [a federal relief agency].”

If only the choice had been so simple. Unlike the 1920s, when California and the urban centers of the Southwest attracted rural folk with new opportunities, displaced

tenants in the 1930s had few practical options. By this time California had a glut of agricultural workers, and the Southwestern cities had higher unemployment than

the rural counties did. The New Deal did offer help. During the early duster years of 1934 and 1935, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided funds to some

2.5 million Southwestern families, about 20 percent of the population. But the aid proved woefully inadequate. In most areas of the country the states supplemented

federal relief payments, but not in the Southwest. Throughout the 1930s some 20 to 35 percent of all families in the region suffered from extreme poverty and

unemployment. This situation is one area in which the story of the Joads brings the plight of 1930s migrants into clear focus.

THE ROAD
As the Great Depression worsened, Roy Turner and his family migrated to a shanty town outside the Oklahoma City stockyards. These encampments (often nicknamed

“Hoovervilles”, after President Herbert Hoover) grew up in many urban areas. In Oklahoma City, the Turners joined some 2,000 others living off a mixture of relief,

part-time jobs, and declining hopes. The Turners described t

atleast 5 refereces, APA STYLE, IN TEXT CITATION, DOUBLE SPACING