Miscellaneous Posts

Was racism born in slavery, or in the early 20th Century?

For almost 70 years the story of white families from the Great Plains making their way to California in the midst of the Great Depression has been kept alive by journalists, filmmakers, college teachers, museum curators, songwriters, novelists, historians, and in the new Millennium...bloggers.

Famous photo "Migrant Mother"

The Dust Bowl saga had something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice.

In 1935 the economist Paul Taylor realized that something was happening in California's agricultural areas. The workers who picked crops had been mostly Mexicans, Filipinos, and single white males before the Depression. But now Taylor noticed more and more whites were looking for jobs, many of them traveling as families with license plates from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.

Those states had suffered greatly in the early 1930s from a severe drought that for several years denied much of the Great Plains sufficient rain to produce its usual complement of wheat and cotton. The drought had also produced a spectacular ecological disaster. Wind driven dust storms in western Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles between 1933 and 1935 filled the air with millions of tons of finely plowed top soil - blackening the skies for a thousand miles as the clouds moved east. The dust storms brought press attention and later government intervention to the affected area, soon known as the "Dust Bowl."

Those white families from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas were showing up in large numbers in the fields of California...they had come with great hope, like the westward moving pioneers of old, but they were heading into disappointment. A shortage of work awaited them. Housing would be a tent camp or a shack thrown together of scraps...these people had become the first "refugees", but some journalists of the day named them "The Dust Bowl Refugees". But the actual Dust Bowl counties were sparsely populated and contributed very few refugees to the migration that was pouring into California. Most were from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas which knew drought and depression, but little dust.

John Steinbeck wrote the book "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939, a fictional account of the Joad family who lose their Oklahoma farm to dust and avaricious bankers, then set out for the California promised land only to find there even greater challenges and hardships. Hollywood followed up with an equally brilliant movie directed by John Ford.

The Joad Family

Numbers are elusive but it is safe to say that 300,000 to 400,000 Oklahomans, Texans, Arkansans, and Missourians moved to California and settled there during the 1930s. This would have been a significant population transfer in any era but was particularly momentous in the context of the depression when internal migration rates for other parts of the country were low and when high unemployment made any kind of relocation very risky. (Despite popular beliefs, almost half of these migrants were from towns or cities, and the rest had been farmers.)

Whites comprised roughly 95 percent of those moving. A few African Americans were represented in the populations of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas - but most had left for the cities of the North. It was not until World War II that large numbers of African Americans would move to the West Coast.

But by the time The Grapes of Wrath was flying off bookshelves in 1939, conditions had already began to improve in rural California due to federal aid programs and to the World War II defense boom. (Still, incomes for many former Oklahomans, Arkansans, and Texans would remain low for some time, and as late as the 1970s poverty experts in the San Joaquin Valley of California talked about "Okies" as a disadvantaged population and could point to poverty and welfare-use rates that exceeded the norms for other whites.)

The "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck

The poverty associated with the Dust Bowl migration had a great impact on public policy. But this high-profile episode (with its sympathetic white victims) helped reshape poverty-related policymaking in various other ways, especially around the issues of interstate migration and farm labor. Poor people crossing state lines would have rights in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl migration, but not just for whiles, but for families with darker skins and different accents as well. Many migration laws in California had been challenged by the ACLU all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1941 the court issued a landmark decision (Edwards v. California) ruling that states had no right to restrict interstate migration by poor people or any other Americans. But by this time, the next generation of whites had already started becoming upwardly mobile, and they laws were mainly for the benefit of minorities.

Race has always been central to the story of the Dust Bowl migration. Paul Taylor knew in 1935 when he wrote his first article about the "drought refugees" that their white skins and Anglo-Saxon names could win attention and sympathy that would not so readily attach to the Mexican and Asian farm workers who normally struggled in the valleys of California. Steinbeck too used the paradox, emphasizing in a dozen ways that Americans of their pedigree were not supposed to experience what the Joads experienced.

As the Dust Bowl saga worked its way into history, race has become still more important. The continuing fascination with this subject over the decades has had as much to do with racial politics as with the events themselves. As poverty became more and more racialized, and as struggles over social welfare programs increasingly contentious, the Dust Bowl migration took on new meanings and new functions.

By the 1970s an aging generation of former migrants and their upwardly mobile offspring where ready to memorialize the experiences of the 1930s and another set of storytellers were ready to help. A new round of journalism, novels, history books, TV documentaries, and country music songs has been the result, much of it fed by a late 20th century need for stories of poverty, hardship, and eventual triumph where the victims are white.

Some liberals say that these latter-day Dust Bowl accounts have sometimes promoted conservative agendas, as in the collection of songs that Merle Haggard produced in the late 1960s and 1970s celebrating the struggles of his parents and implying that the poverty of their generation was more noble than the poverty of contemporary America. And that they were unwilling to acknowledge kinship with the Mexican-Americans who replaced them in the fields or admit the importance of government assistance in Dust Bowl survival strategies. (This is still being debated today.)

But others among the new storytellers see the meanings differently. In keeping alive the Dust Bowl migration saga, they remind America that poverty has had many faces, that disparaging the victims is senseless and cruel, and that the poor and helpless of one era will hopefully escape that fate in the next. That the poor whites and the poor minorities of all races in the last generation (with education, hard work, and honest ethics) can succeed in this generation.

My personal opinion is that, like all government entitlements or government-run programs (such as Social Security, welfare, Medicare, the U.S. Post Office, etc) ... though maybe at first they may be well-meaning in principal, but too soon do they become poorly mismanaged (either by ineptness and/or by outright corruption) and thus they become too much of a financial burden on ordinary taxpayers. It is socialistic my nature, and thus becomes the great debate between liberalism and conservatism - and the great divide in ideologies, from topics like healthcare for illegal immigrants to federally funded abortions; and the argument of "spreading the wealth". Conservatives believe in working hard for all one has, while liberals seem to believe in sharing everything with the poor (even those who are here illegally or don't want to work hard for anything). My dad used to call them "lazy people just looking for a hand out". (My dad was raised a poor boy on a farm in Arkansas during the Great Depression".)

Diversity does not need to be promoted, because it has already existed in this country for centuries...it's only the individuals that need to promote themselves.

See my post - Slavery in America - Revisited in 2009

http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/13/slavery-in-america-revisited-in-2009

Ancestral Ties to Slavery
http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/12/ancestral-ties-to-slavery