Okies

Okies were not born. California created Okies in the crucible of the Great Depression. They remain the only major white, Protestant, family-oriented subculture ever subjected to a form of racial discrimination in U.S. history. The enduring stereotype of the Okie entered American memory largely as the Joad family, with their broken-down jalopy and their tattered American dream, trailing across America to smash against the rock of West Coast hostility. This literary vision immortalized by John Steinbeck in his well-meaning (but perhaps demeaning)The Grapes of Wrath dramatized the Okies as white, Protestant, landless farmers from Oklahoma forced into migratory labor in California's fields. For the purpose of this article, Okies will refer exclusively to Caucasians from the southern Midwest who arrived in California during the Great Depression. The reality, however, is far more complex.

The Great Depression was the major catalyst for the creation of the Okie. The stock market crash of 1929 set hundreds of thousands of individuals moving as the economy began to slide. First men and boys, then women and entire families, sought homes and jobs wherever they could find them. Countless people took advantage of the network of railroads crisscrossing the country, or piled their belongings into rickety cars and trucks, looking for the next best chance. Some people tried to stay on farms, where they could at least cultivate enough food to keep the family fed. Drought scourged much of the country throughout the 1930s, however. Late in the decade, fierce winds whipping through America's midsection raised mighty clouds of dust, which blocked the sun, buried fields and equipment, and powdered everything with unrelenting grit. Even those who had hung on through earlier bad times picked up and left. They went where they had relatives, or where they could find work, or where there seemed to be hope of finding work. Their destination might have been influenced by the railroad schedule, or the end of the line, or the route of a major highway like the fabled Route 66. Lacking money and material goods, they headed toward where the weather was warm and the climate allegedly healthy. California, for many reasons, became the goal of many migrants. By the time most of them arrived on the West Coast, anyone from the southern Plains states who spoke with a drawl had become an “Okie.”

[Page 502]Importantly, not all the so-called Okies were from Oklahoma, nor did they fit the prevalent stereotype in other ways. Among the hundreds of thousands of displaced workers who entered California from all over the United States, former residents of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri predominated. Despite their dirt farmer image, fewer than half of them had previously farmed, either as a landholder, tenant farmer, or sharecropper. Approximately 25 percent came from the ranks of skilled laborers or semiskilled and service workers. Unskilled laborers made up a little more than 10 percent of this migratory wave, rounded out with a smattering of clerical workers, business owners, and professionals. Nor were all the migrants from these states “poor whites.” While most were Caucasian, a minority were of African American, Hispanic (some originally from Mexico), or Native American descent, although spotty record-keeping does not reveal exact numbers. Most carried similar cultural baggage: fervent Protestant beliefs, self-reliance, a love of country-western music, and, for Caucasians, racial attitudes of white supremacy. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.

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