4
Okies and the Politics of Plain-Folk Americanism

James N. Gregory

Editor's Introduction

In the early decades of the twentieth century, California agriculture expanded greatly. In 1900, there were 72,000 farms in the state, valued at a total of $708 million. By 1925, California boasted 136,400 farms, worth more than $3 billion. This growth was spurred by the spread of irrigation, which enabled farmers to cultivate fruits and vegetables on a large scale in the arid Central Valley. The era of "factories in the field" had truly arrived.

The rapid expansion of California agriculture, especially seasonal crops, called for a large, migratory agricultural proletariat. To an extent, this need was met by Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and other minority workers. During the 1920s, however, the Alien Land Acts and other factors greatly reduced the number of Japanese workers in California agriculture. Mexican immigrants, in particular, helped to make up the shortfall, but even their increasing numbers failed to meet the labor demands of California agriculture. During the 1920s and 1930s, these demands were met from a more indigenous source.

While California agriculture continued to expand during the interwar period, this was not the case in many other states. Low prices, foreign competition, mechanization, soil erosion, drought, pestilence, and New Deal farm programs all combined to drive millions of farmers off the land in this period. No area of the country was as hard hit as the American Southwest. By 1950, 23 percent of all people born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri lived outside the region. These states lost 50 percent of their agricultural work force between 1910 and 1950.

During the 1920s and 1930s, more than 550,000 Southwesterners migrated to California, primarily to Los Angeles and the Central Valley, where

a significant number ended up as part of California's agricultural proletariat. In the 1940s, upward of 600,000 more "Okies," lured especially by the prospect of work in California's booming wartime industries, joined the exodus from the Southwest.

Jim Gregory's book American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California provides the most detailed and authoritative account we have of the migration of people from the Southwestern states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri, examining both the causes and the character of this mass migration. Gregory also explores in depth the profound social, cultural, and political impact that this Okie migration had on California in the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, he examines the nature of the Okie subculture in California and how Southwesterners adapted to life in their newly adopted state.

In this extract from his book, Gregory argues that a very distinctive Okie subculture existed in California, "derived largely from the outlooks, habits, and institutions of Southwestern 'plain folk,' a broad social category encompassing most rural and blue-collar whites." Okie culture was an amalgam of many components, including late-nineteenth-century populism and early-twentieth-century fundamentalism.

A "cult of toughness" helped condition the response of the Okies to California. Although their political traditions encouraged them to support some radical causes in the 1930s, their patriotism, racism, individualism, and "toughness" made them indifferent, even hostile, to trade unionism. Later, in the context of World War II, when many Okies got jobs in California's cities, they became much more receptive to trade unionism. But Okies in rural areas remained as indifferent or hostile to agricultural unionism in the 1940s as they had been in the 1930s. Gregory probes the reasons for this through his analysis of Okie culture.

The patterns of alienation built up in the 1930s encouraged the process of cultural adaptation that gave California its Okie subculture. Regional cultural differences that in other circumstances had meant little took on expanded significance in this one. Although some Southwesterners consciously abandoned distinguishing characteristics, others fell back on the cultural resources of their upbringing, creating community systems laced with values and institutions of Southwestern origin. The primary locus of

this subculture was the San Joaquin Valley, but in weakened form it also developed in the metropolitan areas, especially during the 1940s when new waves of migrants created for the first time substantial enclaves of Southwesterners in the cities.

Some definitions are needed. The term subculture is quite elastic, which is useful in this case. A subculture is a social formation with a distinctive set of norms and values that offers members a significant sense of identity and locus for social interaction. Subcultures come in many forms, based on ethnicity, class, religion, political ideology, peer group, even consumer interests. But the Okie subculture does not fit neatly into any one of these categories. Depending upon where we look and also what time periods we examine, the formation seems to take on different shapes.^[1]

Social science has never supplied the right tools for categorizing the process of cultural adjustment that accompanied the Dust Bowl migration. Initially it was not seen as a cultural process at all. Apart from the concern that the migrants came from a "backward" area, few contemporaries gave much thought to questions of regionalism, assuming that differences between native-stock Americans were minor, that culture carried social consequences only when linguistic, political, religious, or moral traditions were sharply differentiated. Trained social scientists were especially reluctant to find significance in the regional backgrounds of the migrant population. In the usual view class and its many complications alone defined the group.

Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt best expressed this assessment. After close consideration he concluded that the migrants were not really a group in any coherent sense. A "disorganized aggregate" sharing conditions of poverty and hostility, they lacked "mechanisms by which they could be organized into a community." Though he described in detail the separate Okie neighborhoods, social life, and religious institutions, he assumed these to be transitory developments attributable to the vicissitudes of class. To the extent that the migrants demonstrated divergent values and customs, a history of rural disadvantage or more recent poverty was to blame. Otherwise, the newcomers seemed to share in the basic standards of the host society and appeared most anxious to win acceptance within it.^[2]

Stuart Jamieson saw matters differently and, for his time, singularly. In 1942 the Berkeley-trained labor economist published the results of his study of Olivehurst, one of several Okie communities in the Sacramento Valley. Struck by the similarities between the social position of the "new American migrants" and the foreign immigrant groups they had largely replaced in the agricultural labor force, he observed that the newcomers

take on the "appearance of a distinct 'ethnic group.'" Despite cultural backgrounds that are "fundamentally the same" as their hosts', he argued, the economic and social context contributed to the migrants' "quasi-segregation" and had the "effect of perpetuating some old traditions and customs of the settlers," among which he listed speech, dress, paternalistic family relations, and religious institutions.^[3]

Although he was essentially alone with this formulation in the 1940s, a time when conventional definitions of ethnicity envisioned only national, religious, and racial groups, the redefinition of ethnicity in the last few decades has made his argument increasingly plausible.^[4] Indeed, it is consistent with what regional sociologists John Sheldon Reed and Lewis Killian have been saying recently about the ethnicity of white Southerners. In a long list of books and articles published since 1972, Reed catalogues the similarities between Southern whites and conventionally recognized ethnic minorities, stressing the region's persecution complex, enduring sectional identity, and persisting differences in social, personal, and religious values. Killian introduced some of the same points in his 1970 book White Southerners , which was published in Random House's Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective series. He also examined the process of Southern out-migration and argued that it was among the "hillbillies" of Chicago and other northern cities that the evidence of minority group behavior was strongest. Caught in an urban context of stereotypes and hostilities not much different from that experienced by their Okie cousins, the working-class Southern whites Killian studied engaged in a process of group formation and cultural retention typical of ethnic minorities.^[5]

It is a tempting argument, but there are some complications, at least in the case of the California migrants. The issue of group definition is one. Until recently, few Southwesterners of the middle class identified themselves as Okies. On the other hand, a number of people from states other than the Southwest associated with and were perceived to be Okies; and some today embrace the term. There is something similarly fuzzy and flexible about the cultural materials, the institutions and symbols, that in time gave the group a sense of community and identity. These, too, have not been consistently and exclusively Southwestern.

While in the end it may be valuable to talk about Okie ethnicity, it is important first to deconstruct the experience, to understand that the subculture has operated in several guises. Being an Okie for some Southwesterners is a straightforward matter of regional heritage, and for them the ethnic concept is relevant. They celebrate their state origins and proudly

proclaim symbols and distinguishing cultural elements of that background. If ethnicity refers to a sense of peoplehood rooted in a perception of common history and ancestry, some Okies qualify.^[6]

But for other participants the subculture expresses something different, either experiential pride (as veterans of the migrant experience) or, most interesting, allegiance to a set of social-political perspectives that might be labeled plain-folk Americanism. This ideological persuasion was part of the cultural system of the Southwest—or more properly of a particular class of Southwesterners—but it was not exclusive to that region. Other white Americans, particularly other rural Protestant-stock Americans, shared many of these interests and values, and still others later found them attractive. Here it is harder to talk about ethnicity, since regionalism was not the central issue. In this guise the Okie subculture was an ideological community of uncertain and, indeed, expanding dimensions. For those who identified with this version of the community, being an Okie was a matter of experiences, standards, and values.

A Framework of Understandings

California's Okie culture derived largely from the outlooks, habits, and institutions of Southwestern "plain folk," a broad social category encompassing most rural and blue-collar whites. As in other parts of the South, the social structure of the trans-Mississippi states divided most obviously into three basic categories: blacks; whites of the business, professional, and land-wealthy strata; and the majority white population of modest means. Some scholars insist on subdividing this last group into its wage-working, tenant farmer, and yeoman components, while others confuse the issue with labels like "poor white" or "redneck." Those distinctions are not helpful here. Tied together in many instances by kinship, rural and formerly rural working-class Southwesterners shared a wide range of life-ways, values, and outlooks. Most of all they shared a seasoned political culture.^[7]

Southwestern plain folk claimed a set of social and political commitments that had once flourished widely in nineteenth-century America. Heirs to anti-monopoly and citizen-producer ideas that in earlier periods had guided both agrarian and working-class radicalism, they stood also in the shadow of generations of white Protestants who had fought to preserve the Republic's ethnic and religious integrity. These perspectives tracked through a long line of neo-populist campaigns aimed at rural and working-class audiences. From the days of the powerful Farmers' Alliance, through the resurrected radicalism of Huey Long, "Alfalfa Bill" Murray, and "Ma" Ferguson, those constituencies responded best to shirt-sleeved

campaigners who talked about the dignity of hard work and plain living and promised deliverance from the forces of power, privilege, and moral pollution, near and far.^[8]

Southwestern plain folk brought these and other outlooks to California and made them the basis for their subculture. What they built, however, was not merely a replica of what they left behind. The Okie subculture evolved through a process of cultural negotiation involving many participants. Partly a dialogue between Southwesterners and their new California setting, there was also a speaking role for non-Southwesterners who associated with the migrant population. The resulting synthesis expressed some of the familiar ways of the Southwest, but other elements were changed or newly emphasized.

The subcultural construction occurred in stages. It was not until the 1940s that the more obvious institutions—churches, saloons, and country music—began to solidify and make an impact on the surrounding society. Until then the subculture was harder to locate. In the 1930s, the group was taking shape informally and more or less unintentionally in the neighborhoods, camps, and job sites where migrants gathered. Through the act of socializing, men and women discovered common understandings and worked out the new meanings that would give the group its sense of identity and cohesion.

We are fortunate to have a source which identifies some of the more important values that were affirmed in those interactions. The "Pea-Patch Press" was Charles Todd's name for the collection of newspapers emanating from the FSA (Farm Security Administration) camps during the last years of the 1930s. Tow-Sack Tattler, Pea-Pickers Prattle, Covered Wagon News, Voice of the Migrant —the colorful, free-form titles say much about the style of these tiny mimeographed publications which were supported by camp fees and published whenever someone volunteered to serve as editor. The format was usually wildly eclectic. More community bulletin board than newspaper, they published a hash of contributions from residents and management. Letters, recipes, poems, jokes, stories, editorials, complaints, homilies, political opinions, discussions of current issues, reports of camp gossip, notices of meetings, lists of rules and regulations, jeremiads by camp managers—whatever was available went out in the next issue.^[9]

Many of the contributions were original, but residents also sent in remembered bits of verse, Bible passages, riddles torn from other publications, anything that seemed meaningful enough to share. It is this participatory aspect which makes the camp newspapers so valuable. We hear from children, parents and grandparents, men and women, union activists

and Pentecostal worshippers, those who liked California and those who hated it. They wrote not only about issues but also about day-to-day life. We witness their attempts at entertainment, their approach to humor, their sense of propriety. In letters, poems, and gossip notes, they argued and agreed about community standards, about morals, about right and wrong as they wrestled with the meaning of their California experience and reminded themselves what was important in life.

Were these camp residents typical of the broader population of Okies? Those who lived in the camps were often poorer, more transient, newer to California than residents of the migrant subdivisions where the lasting social networks were being strung. But any distinctions between the populations of these settings were minor and temporary. Residents of camps and Little Oklahomas came from the same background, occupied the same farmworker class, and faced similar adjustment challenges. In both settings large numbers of mostly Southwestern newcomers explored the basic business of living together. The difference is that the camp residents left us a record of the process.

Cult of Toughness

Reading that record for its core values, one concern stands out. A favorite poem expressed it.

If the day looks kinder gloomy
An' the chances kinder slim;
If the situation's puzzlin',
An' the prospect awful grim,

An Perplexities keep pressin'
Till all hope is nearly gone
Just bristle up and grit your teeth,
An' keep on goin' on.^[10]

The message of persistence, determination, of "try, try again" defined one of the essentials of what the migrants considered good character. Learned in school, in church, from parents and friends, courage and determination were the special forte of these plain people. Struggle, they assured themselves, was what they and their ancestors did best. Persistence was more than the key to success—there could be no dignity, manhood, or self-esteem without it. No other theme was expressed as frequently or as passionately as the need to never let up, never quit, to always "keep on goin' on." Winnie Taggart shared her composition "Migratory Grit" with fellow residents of the Brawley camp near the pea fields in the Imperial Valley:

Forget the grouch, erase the frown.
Don't let hard luck get you down.
Throw up your head, thrust out your chest,
Now at a boy! Go do your best.

It's hard to laugh, and be at ease,
When the darned old peas all start to freeze.
But a pea tramps always full of grit,
He never does sit down and quit.

To laugh, should be the pea tramp's creed
For that is what we greatly need.
It does not take great wealth to laugh
Just have the grit to stand the gaff.^[11]

These calls for courage, determination, and "grit" reflected a preoccupation with toughness that became one of the cornerstones of the Okie subculture. The values involved were in no way unique to the migrants, but in the process of emphasizing and reinforcing them, they were beginning to forge the normative standards of the group and a myth that would anchor expressions of group identity.^[12]

Toughness meant, first of all, an ability to accept life's hardships without flinching or showing weakness, a standard applied to both males and females. Displays of weakness were actively discouraged in the camp newspapers. "Complainers," "grumblers," "gripers," and "whiners" came in for frequent criticism. "All's not well that is the talk; / A grumbler being the worst of the lot," one poet chided.^[13] " 'Taint no use to sit an' whine," cautioned another version of "Keep On A-Goin'."^[14] "Now come on everybody, quit that complaining," a letter writer at the Indio camp in the Coachella Valley urged. "Every cloud has a silver lining. If you don't like things here in camp and the relief you get, be nice enough to keep it to yourself."^[15]

Toughness also meant a willingness to fight, metaphorically for women, in all senses of the word for men.

It takes a little courage;
And a little self-control;
And a grim determination;
If you want to reach the [goal];

It takes a deal of striving;
And a firm and stern-set chin.
No matter what the battle,
If you really want to win.

You must take a blow and give one.
You must risk and you must lose
And expect within the battle
You must suffer from a bruise.

But you mus[t]n't wince or falter.
Lest a fight you might begin.
Be a man and face the battle.
That's the only way to win.^[16]

An Arvin camp resident thought his fellow campers might benefit from that untitled poem, perhaps remembered from childhood, a personal credo now being shared. Its message was a familiar one in the migrant communities. It mentions goals but is mostly about struggles and manliness. A man has courage and self-control, he fights his own battles, facing each with "stern-set chin." And, significantly, he prepares not so much to win as to lose, steeling himself to "suffer from a bruise."

Another poem, labeled "A Man's Creed," repeats the same themes:

Let this be my epitaph
Here lies one who took his chances
In the busy world of men
Battled luck and circumstances
fought and fell and fought again
Won sometimes, but did no crowing
Lost sometimes, but did not wail
Took his beating but kept going
And never let his courage fail.^[17]

In both of these contributions a man's creed is courage, not as a means to something but as a goal itself. What is important is the ability to fight and fall and fight again, to take a "beating" and keep going. There is an understanding of life here that lies outside the Franklinesque formulas of aspiration and success that are the core of middle-class American culture.

These invocations speak to a worldview in which struggle is the only verity, in which society is divided not into winners and losers but into those who fight and those who quit, men and cowards. They speak to a system of honor which, Bertram Wyatt-Brown and others suggest, may be a special feature of the culture of Southern whites. More definitely we can say that these values flourish outside the middle-class mainstream of twentieth-century American society, in working-class and rural contexts where symbols of prestige are hard to come by, where money and occupation cannot be everything. This was a context Okies knew well.^[18]

Physical courage was a central part of the creed, and not just for males. Both children and adults were expected to know how and be willing to fight. Fist fights occurred frequently in the camps, in the schools, and in nearby saloons and were a continual source of concern to camp authorities, among others. Most involved males, but girls also fought with surprising frequency.

Young people have a "strange code," the Shafter camp manager complained in his regular column. "A young lady was called into my office for fighting and she said she had to fight or the other children would call her chicken."^[19] He need only have read his own camp newspaper to begin to understand that the "code" was promoted by parents as well as the younger generation. Aside from crime or base immorality, no more serious charge could be leveled at another person than the charge of cowardice. "The world will forgive you for being blue, sometimes forgive you for being green, but never forgive you for being yellow," a Yuba City camp philosopher intoned.^[20]

The words were meant to be taken seriously, and elsewhere were backed up with punishing ridicule. A boy who walked away from a school fight was mercilessly taunted as a crybaby in the Arvin camp newspaper: "Bill Jones got his feelings hurt in the school room the other day, he went home to get his [baby] bottle but his mother was not home so he came back crying."^[21]

The migrants' support for the values of toughness and courage which made up that "strange code" can also be seen in the enormous popularity accorded the sports of boxing and wrestling. Amateur bouts were staged weekly at many of the FSA camps and quickly proved to be the best attended of the camps' many recreational activities, attracting Okies living outside the camps as well as residents. On some nights, crowds of up to 500 people would assemble to watch what the Shafter Covered Wagon News described as "plenty of good fighting and lots of action."^[22] The matches featured contests between boys of several age levels up to the early twenties and nearly always included at least one pair of girls.

The Shafter paper's description of a fight between two teenage girls shows something of both the enthusiasm for the sport and the importance attached to displays of toughness:

A rough and tumble exhibition was put on by Mildred Searcy and Aldyth Aust, two of our promising young ladies. Mildred sure protected her pretty face all during the two rounds, and bucked like a ram with her head. Both girls displayed good sportsmanship by taking their punishment with a smile.^[23]

That fighting between girls should be sanctioned in this way suggests a significant departure from the standards of comportment absorbed by generations of middle-class American women. Nevertheless, as the passage itself implies, fighting was primarily a test of male honor. For women, toughness had more to do with the ability to shoulder burdens, withstand pain, and bear up under life's trials. Female toughness was preeminently a matter of fortitude.

In several respects the migrants' cult of toughness represented an adjustment of old values to a new setting. In their efforts to deal with the formidable challenges of resettlement, the migrants appear to have emphasized courage and determination even more than they had back home. Beyond that, these values took on new social implications. At home toughness was a matter of individual concern; in California it became a badge of group pride, something that Okies believed made them collectively special.^[24]

To listen to former migrants today is to encounter again and again this proprietorial claim to toughness. It takes various forms, emerging sometimes in proud tales of Okie fighting prowess. In his book Okies , a collection of short stories, Kern County native Gerald Haslam, a second-generation Okie on his father's side, sees fighting as one of the major themes of the group experience. His male characters are frequently locked in combat, proving their courage and manhood to themselves and each other, rising to each challenge instinctively, obsessively, even as they sometimes wish they could turn a cheek and walk away. In the story "Before Dishonor," a battered "good old boy" moves from one teeth-shattering fight to another as other males test the truth of the "Death Before Dishonor" tattoo on his forearm. "There's things a kid does just haunts a man," the protagonist says of the tattoo he must defend. For Haslam it is all part of a particular system of honor which haunts and therefore helps to define Okies.^[25]

If Haslam is intrigued by the Okie reputation for violence, he is not alone. Many of his contemporaries and elders relish stories about fighting, particularly accounts of fights between resilient Okies and insolent Californians. The understanding is that Okies were singularly proficient with their fists, more than a match for their native detractors. "About the time they'd say, 'Okie,' I'd put my fist in their mouth," Byrd Morgan recalls.^[26] Charles Newsome uses the same proud tone in telling of his school-yard fights:

As the Missourians always said, "It was show me time." . . . Well, the Okie was the one that could show them so that's why there were a lot of little tough Okie kids running around the schools because they had to be tough.^[27]

James Lackey was an adult when he arrived in California, and evidently a good fight never came his way. But he witnessed many and sees courage as an Okie trait. "I've never seen an Okie run from trouble at all. If you corner an Okie he's going to fight."^[28] Hadley Yocum likewise takes pride in the fights won by others. "I'll tell you one thing," says the former Arkansas and Oklahoma sharecropper, whose land holdings now make him a millionaire, "the native Californians weren't no match for the boys coming from Oklahoma when it came to fist fights."^[29]

This celebration of combat skills is part of the mythology of the Okie subculture. By mythology I do not mean the claims are untrue—indeed, there are good reasons to believe most of them—but rather that, true or not, such ideas form an important element in the framework of the group's identity.^[30]

The toughness myth extends beyond physical combat, however. In its most important manifestation, Okies find meaning in the belief that they or their parents or grandparents were part of a special encounter with suffering, a special exercise in perseverance and hard work, a special triumph over adversity.

Listen to Francis Walker, who looks back proudly on the years she and her family spent in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley. "The Okies were invincible, they won, they are here, they own land, houses—and are comfortable," she insists.^[31] "Okies were resilient," echoes Dee Fox, a third-generation Okie whose pride in her heritage comes from "hearing all the stories" from her grandparents and parents.^[32] Okies "were willing to work," says Charles Newsome, "they'd work long hours trying to get ahead" while the "big shots" who settled the area earlier "had learned to live on a silver spoon and . . . didn't know how to compete."^[33]

Okies are people "who tried to stay alive and managed," explains Lester Hair, who was born in Arizona as his parents made their way west from Texas in 1924. And struggle, he continues, gives them a sense of pride "that is more important to that person than anything else."^[34] Hard times, hostile treatment, persistence, and struggle—"that's what made Okies out of us, " concludes Texas-born Bernie E Sisk, who worked his way out of the fruit orchards to become congressman from Fresno County.^[35] Whether all this struggle was in fact unique is unimportant; the belief that it was continues to shape a group identity.

A Shifting Populism

Related values of a more political nature also helped the newcomers feel themselves part of a special enterprise. The process turned on their

understandings of American heritage and character. As they took a close look at the residents and the reigning values of their new state, they found a basis for rethinking their inferiority complex. California had some significant flaws. Maybe the migrants were not the ones who should be making the concessions and changes.

Plain-folk Americanism found its central bearings in a neo-populist perspective that understood but two great social classes, producers and parasites. Once key to a far-reaching radical critique of the economic order, the perspective had been changing political coloration since the turn of the century as adherents added anti-Communism, racism, nativism, and the resilient individualism evident in the toughness code to their list of political priorities. By the 1930s, many plain folk embraced an ideological construction which seemed to cross the conventional boundaries of Northern (and Californian) politics. Ever sympathetic to appeals on behalf of the common man or against the "interests," they responded with equal vigor to symbols that recalled a white Protestant and intensely patriotic vision of Americanism. This parochial populist combination matched neither the business conservatism nor the urban liberalism that had become dominant in California's Depression-era political life. A lens through which the migrants judged their surroundings, it became as well one of their contributions to their new state.^[36]

The outlook was evident in the camp newspapers, in the way camp residents dealt with questions of ambition, privilege, and equality. Invocations to personal ambition were curiously muted. For all the talk of determination and fighting, no Andrew Carnegie models appeared on these pages; few indeed were the discussions of competitive striving. This is striking when we consider the didactic nature of many of the contributions and the fact that they were often aimed at the younger generation. Reading closely we can see that particular standards of ambition were being employed. Exhorting one another to be the best they could be, contributors urged also that limits be recognized. Be your own man, proud but no better than anyone else—this was what contributors seemed to want for themselves and their children.

What occupational references there were suggest unfamiliarity with and some distrust of white-collar work. Bankers seem to have been hated, businessmen mostly ignored, bureaucrats and intellectuals widely lampooned. A joke about an "old Texas farmer" who uses common sense to outsmart a pretentious college professor reveals a sense of distance from the world of higher education. Underlying these evaluations was a basic belief in the primacy of manual labor. Real work meant creating with one's

hands either in the fields or in the factories, ideally in a setting where one was independent, "his own boss."^[37]

Clearer than the migrants' occupational discriminations was their intolerance of social snobbery or elitism. Residents frequently blasted those who put on uppity airs, acted "high hat," or who tried to become "better than other people." "In Oklahoma and Texas where we folks come from one person ain't no better than another," an angry Shafter camp resident wrote after learning that elected camp council members were to be henceforth exempt from the task of cleaning bathrooms.^[38]

Outsiders found that a democratic demeanor was essential to any sort of effective dealings with Okies. Eleanor Roosevelt passed the test. After she paid a brief visit to the Shafter camp, the newspaper exuded: "No more gracious lady, no kindlier lady have we folks ever seen. When she talked with us she was so common, so plain, so sincere. Said a man in Unit Five, 'She is plain like all of us—not stuck up or stuffed.' "^[39]

On the other hand, some of the camp managers, most of them young college graduates, ran afoul of the migrants' standards. Oklahoma-born Wiley Cuddard, Jr.,^* criticized the string of previous managers at the Arvin camp—all "educated men, who have never done any real work"— for acting like "Dictators." The last one, he said, was "the professor type, he didn't associate with the people enough, too much business about him." Cuddard had nothing but praise, however, for the new manager, Fred Ross: "he is an educated man but when he came here he acted as one of the boys. . . . He didn't act one bit better than his staff or the people in the camp. And he's always got time to say a few words to you."^[40]

This commitment to social equality and resentment of pretension and authority had implications for the migrants' adjustment. Strictures against social snobbery dampened status ambitions that otherwise might have lured young people out of the working class and hence out of the Okie milieu. Here may be one of the factors in the high drop-out rate among high school students. If the camp newspapers are any guide, young people were taught at home to set modest life goals. Mrs. V. E. Langley passed along this piece of advice to residents of the Brawley camp in the Imperial Valley:

We all dream of great deeds and high positions. . . . Yet success is not occupying a lofty place or doing conspicuous work; it is being the best tha[t] is in you.

Rattling around in too big a job is worse than filling a small one [to] overflowing. Dream aspire by all means; but do not ruin the life you must lead by dreaming pipe dreams of the one you would like to lead. Make the most of what you have and are. Perhaps your trivial, immediate task is your one sure way of proving mettle.^[41]

"The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do," a Yuba City camp resident argued.^[42] That was the message also of a popular poem entitled "Be What You Is" that appeared in print in several different newspapers:

If you're just a little tadpole
Don't try to be a frog
If you're just a tail
Don't try to wag the dog
You can always pass the plate
If you can't exhort and preach
If you're just a little pebble
Don't try to be the beach.
Don't be what you ain't
Jes' be what you is.
For the man who plays it square
Is a-goin to get "his."^[43]

Reinforced by the teachings of some of the churches they attended and also by important themes in country music, messages of restrained ambition doubtless helped to sustain the class integrity of the Okie group.

This sort of class consciousness also had political implications. Politics loomed large in the catalogue of fears inciting native hostility. Residents assumed the newcomers to be Democrats and, worse, probably radical Democrats. They were not far from the mark. Missouri, north Oklahoma, and parts of the Arkansas Ozarks knew something of the Republican party, but most Southwesterners had been raised in areas that acknowledged only one legitimate party. And since the onset of the Depression, major elements of that Democratic party had become reacquainted with radical-sounding rhetoric and proposals which harkened back to the 1890s. Leading Southwestern politicians such as Thomas Gore and "Alfalfa Bill" Murray of Oklahoma, Jim and Miriam ("Pa" and "Ma") Ferguson of Texas, Hattie Carraway of Arkansas, and, of course, the broadly influential Huey Long of Louisiana had greeted the economic crisis of the 1930s with a resurrected language of angry opposition to Eastern money and corporate greed, with dramatic calls for federal action to rein in the rich and re-distribute wealth, and with renewed commitment to the cause and dignity of plain, hard-working folks—in short with a neo-populism (a debilitated populism, says historian Alan Brinkley) that found an eager if perhaps not entirely credulous audience among the region's distressed rural and working-class populations.^[44]

The same disposition shows itself in the voting habits of many of the migrants who settled in California. Using the largely Okie town of Arvin as a gauge, we can see what worried Republicans and conservative Democrats. Arvin, from 1934 through the end of the decade, voted more strongly Democratic and much more in favor of liberal and radical Democratic candidates than the state as a whole. While Californians rejected the 1934 candidacy of Upton Sinclair, Arvin voted for him. Four years later, when Culbert Olson won the governor's mansion with 52 percent of the statewide vote, Arvin residents gave him 71 percent of theirs. Olson's blasts against big business, his calls for public ownership of utilities, and his endorsement of a watered-down version of Sinclair's "production for use" proposal may have bothered a good number of Californians, but those familiar with the anti-corporate, government-as-savior tone of Southwestern electioneering were not among them. The best indication of the neo-populist mind set of the new voters was Arvin's showing on the oddly named Ham 'n' Eggs initiative of 1939. Losing two to one statewide, it won by the same margin in Arvin amidst indications that the proposal was especially dear to the hearts of much of the migrant population. Ham 'n' Eggs was a radical welfare scheme derived from the earlier formulations of Dr. Francis Townsend, the famous Long Beach geriatric crusader. Among other things it called for the distribution of $30 in special scrip every Thursday to each needy Californian over the age of fifty. Like the Townsend plans, the goal was to assist the elderly while stimulating the economy through massive currency expansion.^[45]

Denounced as crackpot economics not only by financial experts and conservative politicians but also by much of the liberal and left community, including Upton Sinclair, the initiative nevertheless seems to have inspired more enthusiasm and political activity than any other issue to come before the Okie group in the 1930s. Letters to camp newspapers and the established press called out their endorsement, often revealing a profound mistrust of the experts who opposed it: the self-same bankers alleged to have brought on and profited from the Depression. "Ham and eggs everybody," Arkansan Henry King urged fellow residents of the Arvin camp. "Do you believe it will work, the money Gods say it wont. . . [Don't] believe those dirty rich liars that say Ham and Eggs wont work. . . Ham and eggs wont work if the rich can help it."^[46]

In addition to playing to the migrants' suspicions of bankers, corporations, and pretentious wealth, Ham 'n' Eggs found a responsive echo in the neo-populist fondness for currency manipulation schemes. Financial conspiracies were responsible for the economic crisis, financial wizardry would resolve it. Bill Hammett was the kind of voter who found Ham 'n' Eggs compelling. Although his comments were made several years before the initiative appeared, his political philosophy suggests the sort of down-home radicalism that earned the ballot measure so much support among resettled Southwesterners:

I ain't no communist . . . I hold the American flag's just as good here and now as when Betsy Ross finished her stitchin' and handed it over to George Washington. What's good over in Russia don't mean it's good for us. I ain't edicated enough to know whether it's Epic plan or Townsend plan or whatever, but if there's plenty folks ready and willin' to raise food and other folks are still starvin', don't take no college edication to know there's some-thin' cloggin' the gin feed.^[47]

Labor's Dilemma

If the migrants' worldview could take them in radical directions, it also, as the orthodox left discovered, took them in conservative ones. The plain-folk ideology circulating in the migrant communities was tinged with much else beside the old populism of their forefathers. When Okies talked of social equality, they usually meant equality for whites and often only native-stock whites. When they sorted out their pantheon of enemies, they frequently figured Communists to be more dangerous than bankers. And when faced with organizational opportunities that might yield collective benefits, they typically fell back instead on habits of individualism and family self-sufficiency. The 1930s marked something of a midpoint in the

transformation of the political culture of Southwestern plain folk. The insurgent potential had been steadily draining away. Even as many South-westerners continued to use a class-based terminology of the plain versus the powerful, more persuasive commitments to patriotism, racism, toughness, and independence were pointing towards the kind of conservative populism that George Wallace would articulate three decades later.

Suggestions of this trend can be seen in the migrants' response to the two left-wing unions which tried to recruit them in the closing years of the 1930s. The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, a Congress of Industrial Organizations union better known by its acronym UCAPAWA, and the Workers Alliance, which called itself the "union of the unemployed," together tried to organize the migrants in their twin roles as farmworkers and relief recipients. Neither was very successful. The plain people's consciousness which found expression in the Ham 'n' Eggs vote fit much less well with the programs and campaigns of radical organized labor.

Strictly speaking, the Workers Alliance was a pressure group rather than a union. A loosely structured organization that enjoyed the support of both the Socialist and Communist parties, it was the chief successor to the militant Unemployed Councils of the early 1930s. Chapters first appeared in the agricultural areas of California in 1936 and quickly began to pick up members among the Okie population dependent upon relief. Sending grievance committees to lobby local relief authorities while backing those efforts with petitions and public demonstrations, the organization gained a reputation for influence and with it a small but significant following in many of the camps and communities. Helpful, too, was the fact that Workers Alliance stewards sometimes controlled the distribution of jobs on WPA projects. Even migrants who disapproved of the organization's radical politics sometimes found it useful to join. "Seems you've might near got to belong . . . to get what's coming to you," one man complained as he contemplated signing up.^[48] Membership figures are hard to judge, but it seems likely that chapters in Arvin, Bakersfield, Madera, and Marysville could each claim the support of several hundred members by early 1939, while smaller chapters operated in several other locales.^[49]

UCAPAWA first appeared in the migrant communities in late 1937. Part of the newly independent CIO, it pulled together several tiny food-processing and farm-labor locals left over from the campaigns of the early 1930s. Its leaders sought first to build a strong base in the canneries and packing houses (a sector rapidly falling to the American Federation of Labor) but at the urging of state CIO leaders agreed to undertake as well the

formidable task of organizing the state's vast armies of seasonal farm-workers. UCAPAWA's commitment to the project, however, was inconsistent and greatly hindered by a shortage of financial resources and skilled organizers. Unsure whether it should be setting up dues-paying locals or organizing strikes, the union mostly drifted behind events. Workers Alliance activists took charge of most of the organizing, converting their chapters into UCAPAWA locals during harvest seasons, and at times initiating walkouts for which UCAPAWA leaders were not fully prepared.^[50]

Serious strike activity began in the fall of 1938 with a spontaneous walkout by several hundred Kern County cotton pickers, many of them residents of the Shafter FSA camp. Emboldened by the reputation of the mediagenic CIO and angered by the drastic wage cuts that accompanied the federally sponsored acreage cutbacks, a militant minority, consisting of Okies and Hispanics, had initiated the action. The union dispatched organizers to try to broaden and discipline the strike, but after some exhilarating efforts at coaxing other workers from the fields using automobile picket caravans, the strike collapsed, helped to its early end of the mass arrest of some one hundred picketers.^[51]

The next year saw a wave of similar walkouts in other crops as cadres of activists spread the union enthusiasm up and down the state. One or two of the strikes resulted in wage increases, but most, like the Kern strike, floundered after dramatic beginnings, either because most workers refused to strike or because other migrants appeared to take the jobs of those who did.^[52]

The cotton harvest of 1939 promised to be the major test. UCAPAWA tried a new strategy. Counting on the support of the recently installed Olson administration and the public sympathy engendered by the publication of The Grapes of Wrath , leaders were hoping to win bargaining concessions from growers without a strike. But when industry representatives ignored the recommendations of the governor's Wage Rate board, the scene was set for confrontation.

The union concentrated efforts in Madera County, where a strong Workers Alliance local had been preparing for months. Initial reports were encouraging. A majority of cotton pickers in the area responded to the strike call, and hundreds gathered in the county park for assignment to picket caravans. Despite some early arrests, observers counted the strike 75 percent effective in the first week in that county, though efforts to inspire walkouts elsewhere in the cotton belt fizzled badly.^[53]

The Madera momentum was also about to end—the Associated Farmers saw to that. On the strike's ninth day, a mob of several hundred growers

attacked a rally of union supporters with clubs, pick handles, and tire irons. Other beatings and arrests followed as local officials cooperated with efforts to break the strike. With the governor unwilling to intervene and most of the leaders in jail or driven from the county, UCAPAWA's most significant farm-labor strike came to a close. The defeat ended serious efforts to organize field workers. Activists maintained some of the locals and kept the threat of further campaigns alive for another year or so, but union headquarters had lost interest and now turned its energies elsewhere.

It is unwise to make too much of UCAPAWA's poor showing. Substantial obstacles stood in the way of any attempt to organize the farm-labor force, an occupational sector that remains largely nonunion to this day. The timing of the UCAPAWA campaign was particularly bad, coinciding with a dramatic drop in farm employment and a growing surplus of workers. The combination made many migrants angry, but left others desperate for work and unable to make the sacrifices a strike demanded.

Slim Phillips's case is indicative of the choices many faced. He had just arrived in California, was out of money, and had not yet heard of the strike when a grower stopped him on the highway and offered him work. He accepted but moments later encountered a carload of strikers. "We want to get a little better price on this cotton," they told him.

So I says we ain't got nothing to eat. If you got the price of something to eat why we can talk business with you, otherwise, we is gonna starve. We just didn't have no money. That was all there was to it. We was broke.^[54]

Given the desperation of people like Phillips, the aggravating labor market conditions, not to mention the difficulties of coordinating farm-labor strikes against the obstinate and very powerful agricultural industry in California, UCAPAWA's failure is anything but surprising. Still, one can ask whether the values and disposition of the migrants had something to do with the campaign's problems. Many observers thought so, concluding in the final analysis that Southwesterners were not good union material, that, as Charles Todd put it, they were "immune to the wiles of the organizer."^[55] Later writers have also followed this lead. Walter Stein argues that the migrants were unfamiliar with unions and too individualistic to support the campaign. Comparing the UCAPAWA experience with the more encouraging results of the earlier Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union drive among mostly Mexican field workers, he observes that "precisely because Okies were rural Americans with that streak of individualism, they were less malleable material for union organizers

than were Mexicans. Rugged individualism and collective action do not mix well."^[56]

Can this be correct? The Western South, historian Lawrence Goodwyn assures us, had once thrilled to the cooperative strategies of the Farmers' Alliance and then with equal vigor had supported the programs of the People's party. Even more distinctively, in the years immediately prior to World War I, Oscar Ameringer, Kate Richards O'Hare, and Thomas "Red" Hickey had built the nation's largest Socialist party membership on the foundation of former Populists. Enjoying the support of thousands of tenant farmers, miners, timber workers, and urban sympathizers, the movement had garnered over a third of the vote in many of Oklahoma's poorer counties, and substantial numbers as well in western Arkansas and northern Texas. Now a mere twenty years later was it possible that migrants from this region were too individualistic to contemplate joining a union? ^[57]

The story is more complicated than that. First, it is important to understand that not all migrants responded alike to the union campaign. A sizable minority did join or support these organizations. Many of the activists who agitated in the fields and camps, triggered the walkouts, and mounted the picket caravans were Okies, as were the hundreds and occasionally thousands who responded to their calls. Though definitely in the minority, the number of union supporters was by no means negligible. Just how many there were is not clear, but three small surveys perhaps provide a clue. Approximately one-quarter of the 60 men James Wilson interviewed were UCAPAWA members or supporters; 30 percent of Lillian Creisler's 100 Modesto respondents, not all of whom were farmworkers, belonged to some sort of union; and 39 percent of Walter Hoadley's 117-family Salinas area sample said they might like to join a union, though UCAPAWA was not specifically mentioned. To estimate, then, that one out of every three at least sympathized with the union would not be irresponsible.^[58]

Many belonging to this pro-UCAPAWA segment seem to have had prior experience with either unions or radical causes. Arthur Brown,^* active in UCAPAWA in Kern County, learned his unionism working in the oil fields of Oklahoma. Carrie Morris and her husband, mainstays of the Marysville local and leaders of several walkouts, claimed thirty years of unionism in various industries before coming to California. Likewise, the president of the Wasco local, who looked back on careers in both mining and railroad work, liked to tell visitors that he had "been a Union man all my life." Given the number of farmworkers who had previously worked in nonagricultural jobs, these backgrounds were not unusual.

Some 28 percent of residents in Modesto's Little Oklahoma claimed previous union experience.^[59]

Other sympathizers came to UCAPAWA via the Southwest's radical movements. Like Jim Ballard, an Arkansas tenant farmer who grew up reading the Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason , some of the people settling in California were veterans of the prewar Socialist campaigns. Others, too young to have participated in the glory days of the Debsian movement, had been involved in such Depression-era leftist ventures as the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, the Oklahoma-based Veterans of Industry (an organization of the unemployed), or, for that matter, the Workers Alliance, which had chapters in the Southwest as well as California. Tex Pace, editor of the Visalia camp Hub , is a good example. His penchant for items about Commonwealth Labor College at Mena, Arkansas, suggests his roots in the radical subculture of his home region.^[60]

These radicals, however, no longer enjoyed the sympathy that would have once made them welcome in a large percentage of the region's rural households. The two decades since World War I had indeed seen a major transformation in political consciousness. The patriotic fervor and uncompromising repression of the war and Red Scare years had begun the process. Next came the nativist, fundamentalist, and moral reform crusades of the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan attained for a time major influence in the region, taking power in Texas and Arkansas and coming close in Oklahoma. The experience helped even Klan opponents learn to equate radicalism with treason, anti-Communism with Americanism.^[61]

The region's farm population had been especially affected. Even though the Klan found more enemies than friends among the region's plain folk, the organization's preeminent lesson took hold in the 1920s. Henceforth, patriotism would remain the foremost proposition for the majority of Southwestern farm folk. All other impulses, including their continued interest in economic justice, would be subject always to qualms about the proper activities for loyal Americans. For the organized left, this proved an insurmountable burden. Still a force in the Southwest's cities, oil fields, and mining camps, radicals usually encountered an aroused and suspicious majority opinion in rural and small-town settings. Despite the turmoil and discontent that the 1930s brought to the region's farm population, patriotic concerns channeled most energies away from the radical left, sometimes into the election campaigns of neo-populist candidates such as Murray and Carraway, sometimes into apathy.^[62]

It was to be the same in California. Chief among the obstacles that the unionists faced were the strong anti-Communist sentiments of many of

their fellow migrants. Both UCAPAWA and the Workers Alliance were vulnerable on that score. As grower representatives and major newspapers never tired of pointing out, both organizations had important links to the Communist party. For people like Oklahoman Clint Powell,^* there was nothing more to be said. Probably unaware that he was inverting the Populists' famous challenge to raise less corn and more hell, he refused to have anything to do with a "damned red outfit" which "just raises more hell than anything else."^[63]

Even migrants who otherwise claimed to be interested in unionization were sometimes deterred by the Communism issue. An old-timer who felt that unionization was definitely "in my interests" nevertheless insisted that "it won't do us a bit of good unless it's 100 per cent, and unless all the radicals are killed off." "The radicals," he continued, "are so unreasonable, it hurts rather than helps us."^[64] A twenty-seven-year-old Oklahoman who felt "we need some form of pullin' together to prevent goin' into slavery" was also wary. Though he thought UCAPAWA "is the best thing we've got now to keep wages up," he was not a member. "I don't knock on the CIO but I do say let's be careful lest we join an organization that's influenced by some foreign government."^[65]

The scope and vehemence of this concern seem unusual for the late 1930s. Most sectors of the American public probably shared the migrants' antipathy towards Communism, but not in the same measure. At least in urban settings, the CIO found its Communist allies more help than liability, as tens and hundreds of thousands of industrial workers ignored red-baiting campaigns and picked up the union card. But anti-Communism had become a more serious proposition in heartland regions like the Western South where the nativist-fundamentalist fires of the 1920s had burned so brightly.^[66]

Religious and racial concerns also had something to do with UCAPAWA's difficulties. The evangelical churches that claimed the attention of a significant minority of the migrant group often spoke against union membership, sometimes quite vehemently. "They get up and tell the people that the CIO is wrong, and that those who are wearing the CIO badges have the mark of the 'beast' upon them," a UCAPAWA leader charged, and he suspected the preachers were "paid by the ranchers."^[67] They did not need to be bribed. Many of these churches belonged to Pentecostal or Holiness sects that taught that all forms of political action were wrong because they distracted from the pursuit of individual salvation. Worldliness of any kind was to be avoided. Even the conservative American Federation of Labor "had trouble with these holy rollers." A frustrated Cannery

Workers Union official complained, "They have screwy ideas. Some of them don't want to belong to any organization and will quit their jobs rather than join a union. Their preachers won't let them belong to any organization, but their own."^[68]

Again, it had not always been so. Evangelical groups had played a different role in the era of Southwestern radicalism before World War I, says historian Garin Burbank. The Socialist movement, he argues, gained the support of preachers and deeply religious farm folk who found a resonance between the promises of Socialism and chiliastic Christianity.^[69] But that link had largely dissolved by the 1930s. Among the ministers and religious-minded migrants who came to California one finds only scattered examples of sympathy for radicalism: a Nazarene minister active in the Olive-hurst chapter of the Workers Alliance; a Pentecostal preacher known as Brother Theodore, who reconciled his belief in Socialism by saying, "Ah have to seek the truth, Brother, an' after ah've found that truth then ah've gotta preach it"; and Lillie Dunn, who discovered Jesus at age thirteen and the Communist party twelve years later and never found the two in conflict.^[70] They were exceptional. Most of the migrants involved in the union campaign were not necessarily irreligious, but rarely were they closely involved in a church.^[71]

UCAPAWA's policy of racial inclusion may have also limited its appeal to white Southwesterners. Like most left-wing CIO organizations, the union insisted that workers of all colors and national origins be included, though not always within the same local. Bowing to the logic of language groups, UCAPAWA divided them into Spanish- and English-speaking locals. Still, the fact that Hispanic farmworkers, some of them veterans of the 1933 strikes, played prominent roles in some strikes kept certain whites on the sidelines. Even more troublesome was the presence of a small number of black unionists. The Wasco local evidently defied headquarters and discouraged interested blacks from attending most functions. The local's president denied this and assured Walter Goldschmidt that all races were welcome, but his wife interrupted to insist, "You can't equalize me with no nigger—I don't care what."^[72]

The issue of individualism remains to be considered. Much depends on the definition, whether an ideology or a condition is meant. The notion that rural Southwesterners were "rugged individualists" unfamiliar with the rudiments of cooperation is another one of the mistaken stereotypes generated by a society that was uncomfortable with its rural shadow. Here is the New York Times quoting a Farm Security Administration official's characterization of the migrants: "These are men who got a shotgun and

guarded a stalk of cotton that was hanging over the fence so that the farmer on the other side of the fence wouldn't pick it." "They're the greatest individuals on earth," he went on. "They'd die in a factory."^[73] This is nonsense. Okies were neither loners nor frontiersmen, and they did as well as anyone else in the factories. Cooperation was certainly nothing new. The churches that many supported and attended before coming to California were proof of that.^[74]

On the other hand, it was true that plain-folk culture gave considerable emphasis to issues of self-reliance and personal or family autonomy, and true that even today symbols of independence rank highly in the honor scheme of the Okie group. That makes the union question complicated, because it is not necessarily true that unionism and the spirit of independence are incompatible. Over the years a good deal of American labor activism has been generated in defense of principles of self-reliance, manhood, and personal integrity. From railroadmen in the 1880s to teamsters in the 1980s, the collective discipline of unionism seems often to be marshaled in favor of symbols of pride and independence.^[75]

The notion that Okies were unprepared for or ideologically opposed to unions breaks down as soon as industries other than agriculture are considered. In the oil fields and canneries, or in the shipyards and aircraft factories that many entered during World War II, Southwesterners showed little reluctance and in some cases considerable enthusiasm for workplace organization. Confronting faceless corporations, they were readily persuaded that the exercise of group power was not only practical but honorable.

But a union of farmworkers seemed a different proposition. Farming was too sacred an endeavor for the tactics of the factory. Whatever their current social station, the majority of these former farmers could not but remain loyal to the enterprise of their ancestors. And whatever their current economic interests, they thus found it hard not to identify with their employers.

UCAPAWA faced an impossible public relations problem. Organizers tried to convince the newcomers that California agriculture was not what they were used to, that independent farming was a fiction in an industry controlled by giant concerns, and that in any event the union had no quarrel with the small growers. "All the farms around here are financed, and the finance companies wouldn't allow but so much [for wages], and they couldn't pay more," explained a Missourian who found the lessons persuasive. It galled him that "a bunch of these Chamber of Commerce,

White Collar fellows, who never farmed in their lives, go up to Fresno every year and set the prices."^[76]

But even as many of the migrants agreed with the union's characterization of the system as "monopoly agriculture," it was difficult for UCAPAWA to break the bonds of sympathy that these former farmers often felt for their particular California employers. Many are the stories of workers who stuck by their bosses during the strikes because "he was a good fellow." Ed Crane, who allows that "I never was too much on strikes," worked through several in the 1930s. "If I'm working for a person I owe my allegiance to my employer until it becomes patently unfair and then I'll go somewhere else to go to work. That's been my theory of the whole thing."^[77]

Particularly if they worked for a grower of modest scale, the migrants were quick to identify with him. A young father from Kansas was barely feeding his family on his 25 cents per hour wage. But though he knew it "is a little too low, a man should have 30 cents," he was not complaining. "Under present prices these California farmers are payin' about all they can stand fer wages. . . . Last year a good many farmers went broke."^[78] Martin Childs^* sympathized with the aims of the union but was too much of a farmer at heart to fully accept the logic of opposing interests implicit in the union strategy. "The ranchers have done pretty well [by us]," he allowed. "Our main drawback is too many people. We've rustled pretty hard in my family and got quite a bit of work. They seem to pay a reasonable fair price. Some folks don't think they do, but I figure they pay a reasonable fair price."^[79]

And with less frequency the same logic worked for even the wealthiest of growers. James Lackey is today a stalwart member of the pipefitters' union, but in the late 1930s he made his home on the gigantic DiGiorgio ranch, most famous of the "factories in the field." And he had no interest in the union: "I didn't see anybody taking advantage of anyone. . . . It was friendly and the bosses were good. In fact I talked to the old man DiGiorgio, the one that owned it, and little Joe. . . . they was just like common people. All the bosses were swell." Here was the unions' dilemma. A farmer (even a millionaire California grower with international corporate interests), if he acted like a man of the soil and treated his employees with dignity, was more of a kindred spirit than were some of the allies the unions proposed: nonwhites, Communists, educated middle-class sympathizers.^[80]

The significance of all this for the UCAPAWA campaign was limited. Farm-labor unionism in the late 1930s was defeated by market conditions

that would have undermined even the most determined constituency. But the migrants' response helps us to see both the variation in their political orientations and the majority trend. If we seek the central tendency in this emerging subculture, we will find it among those who were suspicious of the left and impressed with gestures of independence and toughness even while they retained a faith in programs that promised economic justice. This was a political culture in transition, lodged somewhere between the agrarian radicalism of an earlier era and the flag-waving conservatism of the next. And for the moment it found at best an awkward home in California, fitting only partly under the very liberal banner of California's Democratic party.

True Americanism

Nativism and racism were aspects of the value system of Southwestern plain folk which figured also in the subculture taking shape in California. For all their aggravation at the hands of middle-class white society, nothing bothered the newcomers more than California's system of racial and ethnic relations. It was one of the features of their new surroundings that convinced them that California's standards, not their own, needed changing.

Settlement in California imposed a number of unfamiliar ethnic encounters on migrants from the Western South. Coming from a region where blacks and in some settings Hispanics were the only significant minorities and where white Protestant supremacy was an unquestioned fact of life, the greater diversity and somewhat more tolerant habits of California offered a serious challenge.^[81]

Some found themselves working for Italian, Scandinavian, Portuguese, Armenian, or perhaps even Japanese growers; others for Hispanic labor contractors or once in a while a black contractor. They competed for jobs with Hispanic and Filipino workers, sometimes finding that these groups were preferred by certain growers. All this was confusing. "We thought we were just 100 percent American," recalls Martha Jackson, who arrived in California as a teenager in 1937. "I had never heard of an Armenian, I had never met an Italian and I never had seen Chinese or Japanese or Mexican people. . . . We thought their grandparents didn't fight in the Civil War or Revolution."^[82]

The new encounters were especially difficult because of the contempt Okies experienced at the hands of so many white residents. Accustomed to a social structure which guaranteed them ethnic privileges, they read California's arrangements as an inversion of accustomed patterns. "I have not noticed the California critics condemning the Filipinos, Japanese, or any

other foreigners," William Siefert wrote to Fresno's major newspaper. "But when United States born citizens come here, they say we cut wages and lower their standard of living."^[83]

"Just who built California?" another writer asked rhetorically before revealing his ignorance of California's ethnohistory:

Certainly not the Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, etc., that you let stay inside her borders. . . The aliens are perfectly welcome, but the real citizens must stay out. . . Not one word of protest did I hear [about foreigners]. But let a citizen from the East come out here and try to make a home and be a respectable person and one hears plenty.^[84]

James Wilson encountered similar complaints among the migrants he interviewed in Kern County. Among those who would speak freely of their feelings of discontent, several blamed Mexicans, Japanese, and Filipinos, all of whom, one Oklahoman claimed, "git the cream of the crop, they git the jobs." "That is where a lot of our trouble is," he continued, "the country is too heavily populated with foreigners . . . the farmers ain't got no business hirin' them fer low wages when we native white American citizens are starvin'."^[85] It was bad enough, Clyde Storey^* maintained, that Californians refused to "treat you like a white man," but to encounter a sign reading "No White Laborers Need Apply" at the ranch belonging to former President Herbert Hoover was in his mind the most painful irony of all.^[86] A young Oklahoman summarized the fear that pressed heavily on the self-esteem of many migrants: "they think as much of a 'Nigger' uptown here as they do white people."^[87] It was not true, of course, but the decline in their own social position, combined with what most Southwesterners saw as a substantial elevation in the rights of racial and ethnic minorities, perhaps made it seem so.

Without question the most troubling feature of the California ethnic system for Southwesterners centered on interactions with blacks. A tiny black population shared the farm-labor occupational strata with Okies in the San Joaquin Valley. Excluded even from the FSA camps, living mostly in isolated enclaves in some of the larger towns, blacks, as always, suffered far more serious economic and social discrimination than any whites. Still, they enjoyed certain opportunities not common to the Southwest, and these offended the sensibilities of the newcomers. The superiority of white over black was the bottom line of plain-folk culture, and any change in the status of black people was very deeply felt.^[88]

The most obvious breach in segregation etiquette occurred in the schools, some of which admitted black students to the same classrooms as whites.

Ruth Woodall Criswell recalls the resulting trauma in her household. It was "the first time in my life I'd ever gone to school with anyone except just white children." Her parents "could hardly reconcile themselves to the fact. At first they didn't seem to mind so much about the Mexican and Chinese but the blacks bothered them."^[89]

Noting that "they are niggers back home but colored people here," one of Goldschmidt's informants confessed similar worries. "I thought it would be awful to send our children to school with niggers, but they aren't so bad. The children like the niggers alright—they don't bother any. These niggers around here don't bother us any if you let them alone."^[90]

Alvin Laird was one of many Southwestern parents who became embroiled with school officials over the issue. He claims (though it is hard to believe) that education authorities in the Imperial Valley tried to enroll his children in an "all-colored school." "My children ain't going to go over there," he told the officials, and rather than send them he kept them out of school until the family moved north to the San Joaquin Valley. There were problems in the new setting as well. After his daughter was blamed for an altercation with a black teenager, he confronted the school principal, announced that his daughter would not apologize, and threatened that if the youth "don't leave my daughter alone I'll have one of them boys of mine to whop him so you won't know him when he comes to school."^[91]

Parents' anxieties were played out in a sometimes violent fashion by the younger generation. Charles Newsome remembers with some embarrassment his first days at an elementary school in Tulare County.

The teacher assigned me and told me to go sit in this desk . . . it was right behind the only colored kid in the class. So I was a little smart ass Okie and I had never had much school with them so no way was I going to get behind no colored kid . . . I told her "Teacher, I don't sit behind no nigger." So when recess time came naturally that's when a fight got started.^[92]

The fighting became more serious in the upper grades. High school teachers sometimes blamed Okie youths for persecuting black students, anti knifings and serious brawls were reported.^[93] Not all of this was the fault of whites. Juanira Price, one of the few black Oklahomans to come west during the 1930s, recalls some of the violence in the Bakersfield area and blames it on both sides:

When the white Southerners came here a lot of them got whippings from black people . . . the blacks had a little hostility in them and when they came out to California they thought the situation was different so they could just whip a white fella and forget it. And many fights went on. The

blacks had said all their lives, "one of these days I'm going to whip me a white kid," and they'd whip one. It was just stupidity.

Some of it was also bloody. She tells of one particularly violent incident. "Tex's Bar," an Okie hangout in Bakersfield, prominently displayed a "NO NIGGERS" sign on the door. When a black man walked in one day, the owner tried to throw him out. The would-be customer then pulled a knife and "cut him up real bad."^[94]

All this needs to be qualified. Racial tolerance was not unknown in the Western South, and some migrants warmly endorsed more equitable racial relations. Despite the example of the Wasco UCAPAWA local, racial liberalism was especially pronounced among the minority who participated in unions and radical politics. And others also came to accept the sorts of inter-ethnic contact that California imposed. James Wilson listened as a group of young cotton choppers discussed their employer, a black labor contractor:

As the conversation indicates, this was a process which would take time. Even as some whites were learning new lessons, others clung tenaciously to racial animosity. And if we are looking again for central tendencies, it would have to be said that racism remained the subculture's dominant voice. Many Southwesterners found purpose in speaking out against rather than for interracial understanding.^[96]

This became quite evident in the 1940s, when the racial composition of California underwent a fundamental change. Black migration accelerated dramatically during World War II, nearly quadrupling the state's Afro-American population by 1950. Where Okies and blacks met there was

continual tension. Sociologist Katherine Archibald observed the conflict in a Bay Area shipyard. Blacks were resented by most whites, she noted, but especially by Okies, who "found it hard to accept the casual contact between Negro men and white women to which Northern custom had become indifferent—sitting together on streetcars and buses, standing together before lunch counters or pay windows, working side by side in the same gangs."^[97] Grumbling that "it's the niggers who are taking over California," Okies talked loudly, she added, about lynchings and other bloody remedies. "What you need round here," one Southwesterner told her, "is a good old-fashioned lynching. Back in my home state we string a nigger up or shoot him down, every now and then, and that way we keep the rest of them quiet and respectful."^[98]

Apparently it was not all talk. Violent incidents, including cross burnings and even murders, occurred in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, settings where defense work brought the two groups of Southerners together. At the end of the war a brief florescence of Ku Klux Klan activity in southern California was linked to Southwestern whites.^[99]

Southwesterners enjoyed no monopoly on racism, of course. Nor did California, with its legacy of anti-Asian sentiment, need instructions in white supremacy. Black newcomers met resistance from many quarters. But some white Southwesterners brought a heightened militancy to the subject. Both because interracial contacts at work and school were new and because their self-esteem at this juncture was so fragile, vigorous racism became a prominent feature of the Okie response to California. Charles Newsome remembers the transference. "The people out here [Californians] looked down on the Okies but the Okies looked down on other people too at the time."^[100]

An outlet for frustration, racism was in subtle ways also a source of group identity—something that made at least some Okies feel special and distinct. While many white Californians shared the migrants' racist outlook, the fact that some features of California law and custom were different than back home allowed certain newcomers to conclude that there was much that was wrong with the state and its citizenry. And some, as we see in Archibald's report, styled themselves guardians of white supremacy, dispensing advice on how to deal with blacks. Here, sadly, was another understanding and shared purpose, another piece of the subcultural framework.

Native Sons

If the debasement of California's nonwhites had therapeutic and group definitional implications, the migrants' concept of Americanism figured

more ambiguously in relations with the state's whites, most of whom possessed old-stock credentials not much different than their own. Mostly, Americanism provided a bridge. That so many of the Californians were "Americans" minimized the migrants' defensive reactions and sustained their interest in assimilation, which as we have seen was one compelling strategy of adjustment. But for some members of the group, expectations about the behavior of proper Americans also provided ammunition for criticizing their native hosts. And while this endeavor was but a weak reflection of the disdain Okies knew was directed their own way, it offered some measure of emotional conciliation and group definition.

Southwesterners used several devices to turn the tables on Californians, the simplest of which were snide labels of their own, including "Calies," "native sons," and the curious favorite, "prune pickers," which played on the bathroom humor associated with the sticky, sweet dried fruit. A stereotype accompanied the labels, the thrust of which was that Californians were selfish, arrogant, "privileged characters" who thought they were better than everyone else. As one novice poet put it:

Some of the Californians go around, with their nose stuck up;
Like when it would rain, They'd use it for a cup.^[101]

This view of rude and haughty natives was often coupled with the notion that Californians had grown soft and lazy, and furthermore that their resentment of the migrants was rooted in jealousy and fear. "If it weren't for Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, there wouldn't be much to California, would there?" a migrant hitchhiker lectured Charles Todd. He figured that everybody else in the state had forgotten the meaning of real work.^[102]

As have-nots often do, the migrants also enjoyed suggestions that Californians' lofty social positions rested upon lowly origins and ill-gotten or unearned wealth. A popular ditty that apparently pre-dated the Dust Bowl migration delighted Okies with its irreverent view of the California pedigree.

The miners came in forty-nine,
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they bunked together
They begot the native son.^[103]

The author of a letter to the Modesto Bee had different suspicions about California bloodlines. Establishing his own credentials as a "native son of the U.S.A." whose "father and grandfather served in the Civil War," he addressed his challenge "to the native son who owns your big dairies, your big vineyards, your big orchards, look up the records and get the facts. . . .

The few I have worked for, I have been informed, got their starts from their fathers, who happened not to be native sons."^[104] Here was the plain folks' critique in a nutshell: "big" farms, too big and too cushy; unearned wealth and social position; and possibly immigrant backgrounds. It was quite a brief.

Still, these attempts at denigration, unlike those directed at nonwhites, were not particularly serious. Few Okies really entertained feelings of superiority over white Californians. Most of the jibes were simply attempts to reassure themselves and regain some composure. Nevertheless, the process had bearing on the emerging subculture. In clarifying their definitions of proper Americanism and in laying special claim to that heritage, the migrants were developing an identity capable of sustaining a group experience that initially owed its existence to external forces of class and prejudice.

We will let Ernest Martin restate the proposition that underlay the group identity. An Oklahoman who came to California as a child, grew up in the valley, then moved to Los Angeles and became a minister and religious scholar, he speaks boldly and with insight about the cultural and cognitive parameters of the Okie experience. They considered themselves "the best Americans in the world," he recalls. "To our people their way of life was America. New York isn't America . . . we were America."^[105]

There is no simple statement of regional pride. The Okie subculture was anchored in a group concept that is not reducible to the ethnic formula that scholars sometimes employ in relation to other groups of Southern white out-migrants. Instead of a particularistic definition of the group based on state origins, many Southwesterners laid claim to a nativist conception of national community. Plain-folk Americanism was in some respects a regional enterprise—white Southerners were its core proponents in California—but it also spoke to and for whites of many other backgrounds. Hence, the curious dynamics of the Okie subculture. Southwesterners drew together and gained feelings of pride and definition from this ideological system but never manifested the exclusivity, the insularity, of an ethnic subsociety. Plain-folk Americanism gave their community a different thrust, outward and expansive, open to other whites who embraced the proper values. These heartlanders had come to California with something not just to save but to share.

This would become increasingly clear in the decades to come. The 1940s would simultaneously reduce the structures of social and economic isolation and encourage the proliferation of key cultural institutions. Country music and evangelical churches would become important emblems of the

Okie group in the post-Depression decades. And each would function in the dual manner we have been observing, on the one hand solidifying elements of group pride, while also carrying messages of wider appeal that helped to spread the Okie cultural impact far beyond the formal boundaries of the Southwestern group.

Further Reading

Burke, Robert E. Olson's New Deal for California . 1953.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. "One or Two Things I Know About Us: Okies in American Culture." Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 4-35.

Goldschmidt, Walter. As You Sow . 1947.

Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California . 1989.

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul S. Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion . 1939.

Larsen, Charles E. "The EPIC Campaign of 1934." Pacific Historical Review 27 (May I958): 127-148.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture . 1982.

Mitchell, Greg. The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics . 1992.

Morgan, Dan. Rising in the West: The True Story of an "Okie" Family from the Great Depression Through the Reagan Years . 1992.

Mullins, William H. The Depression and the Urban West Coast . 1991.

Putnam, Jackson K. Old-Age Politics in California: From Richardson to Reagan . 1970.

Stein, Walter J. California and the Dust Bowl Migration . 1973.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath . 1939.

Zimmermann, Tom. "'Ham and Eggs Everybody!'" Southern California Quarterly 62 (Spring 1980): 1-48.