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]