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.