Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination

Public Interest, Summer, 1998 by Roger Starr

The Dust Bowl produced an icon to replace the Conestoga Wagon of westward-bound migrants in the previous century. Its emblem was a rattletrap, open Model T, piled high with family goods roped precariously in place. Younger family members, clinging to the ropes, sat or lay down on the cargo. Elders squeezed together on the seats. Gasoline was bought in small gulps, each stop providing a chance to add water to the radiator, always on the verge of overheating.

The migration was stimulated by leaflets distributed in Oklahoma by California growers, announcing that good jobs awaited in California. Lacking other grounds for hope as they abandoned their dry and dusty lands to mortgagees and lessors, migrants thought they might save enough California wages to buy a small California farm. They soon learned that wages were low and that small farms like those they had lost were few in the far West.

Charles J. Shindo, who teaches history at Louisiana State University, demonstrates in Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination(*) that, despite their troubles, the migrant Okies continued to think of themselves as landed proprietors. What they wanted was the return of the property they had farmed, including the shabby homesteads in which several generations of progenitors had lived without plumbing or electricity. They might have welcomed a governmental mortgage moratorium enabling them to hold on. Many would have tried to use government credit to trade mules for tractors, and kerosene for electricity. Above all, they wanted their own land, not solidarity with other landless folk.

But, according to Shindo, the artists - the "communicators," he calls them - presented a very different vision of the Okies. Having read Steinbeck, seen Dorothea Lange's sombre photographs of migrant mothers against an empty sky, and heard country singer Woody Guthrie denounce private land ownership, urban elitists believed that Okies were the militant rural avant-garde. They imagined them to be allies of the workers in the struggle to replace the "corrupt American system."

Shindo seems determined, moreover, to make even finer distinctions between the philosophies of the several "communicators" who had interested themselves in the Okies. He tests the general reader's patience, elucidating fine points of doctrinal difference between John Steinbeck, novelist, and John Ford, director of the movie version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Although every line of dialogue in the film is taken directly from the book, Shindo argues that the novel took special interest in downtrodden Americans and hinted that concerted action might some day reverse the cruel system that kept them in thrall. In contrast, the movie under Ford's direction portrayed the Okies as cheerfully accepting life in government-built migrant camps. Shindo suggests that Ford, instead of pressing for mass action, was satisfied with the social policies of a Jeffersonian democracy.

At greater length, Shindo distinguishes between the significance of Lange's photographs of migrant mothers against an empty sky and the revolutionary savor of Woody Guthrie's lyrics. While these analyses have a place on a shelf of American regional histories, the reader is likely to be more interested in why the ideological heart of Steinheck's novel thrilled book reviewers in the late 1930s and yet seems almost embarrassing today.

The heart of The Grapes of Wrath is a speech, repeated word for word in the movie, by the hero Tom Joad. The Joads are Okie migrants who reach California and, after many tragic, even brutal vicissitudes are, at the end of their saga, finally in view of what they have been told are decent jobs. Tom, having come to believe that more is wrong with America than can be cured by a better job, decides to part from his family. But he tells his mother that she will always be able to find him, at least in a mystical sense. When she wonders when and where she will ever see him again, he offers the following:

I'll be there ... wherever you look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - and I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know when supper's ready. An' when our people eat the stuff they raise, an' live in the houses they build, why I'll be there too.

Throughout the book and movie, Tom has been a brave but consistently laconic young man, and the sudden burst of rhetoric, most of which has a distinctly (though not quite exclusively) urban flavor, sounds more like Steinbeck's voice than his character's. This reviewer was thrilled to his boots by Tom's speech when he read it in 1939, but a lot of such speeches have been heard since then, and current readers may be more likely to compare this parting to the death of Little Neil in The Old Curiosity Shop than to a modern Marseillaise.

The worst natural disaster prior to the Oklahoma Dust Bowl was the Ukrainian famine, which threatened 15 to 20 million Russians with starvation. By 1921, it was clear that outside help was necessary. The American relief effort is said to have saved millions of lives. During the Dust Bowl crisis, some Americans, recalling the Ukrainian famine, urged Washington to provide similar help to our own Okies. Few remembered that the magnificent American aid effort was organized and administered by a man named Herbert Hoover, the same man who, as president, was held responsible by many of his fellow citizens for the origins and persistence of the Great Depression and, perhaps, the Dust Bowl.