Not one of my normal topics, but I was thinking about these people and think that by reviewing where they came from and where they went, we might get some insight into the current state of affairs in our country. What most people know about Oakies comes from the movie "The Grapes of Wrath" and John Steinbeck books. As a person who was close to the situation and has had time to look back on it and them, I think I just might have something to add. I don't know of an event in American history that has had such an affect on a group of people and that we now have the opportunity to see how the whole situation has played out. It was a recent event and has just now returned to stability. Here goes.
First, just who were these people? They were all different, but all had a common trait. Their situation arose as a result of the greatest modern drought to hit the USA. Further, it occurred during the worst recession or depression in modern history. When two such major events occur at the same time, it is like the "Perfect Storm". Unthinkable things can happen in situations like that. The people who we refer to as Oakies all came out of the same general geographic area where the Great Dust Bowl was its worse. Many of these people were from Oklahoma, but not all. The Dust Bowl covered an area larger than just Oklahoma. First we need to look at who these people were to have been in Oklahoma and that general area in the first place. The people were mostly white, but not all. They were predominately Protestant. Very few were Catholic. They had all moved to the area in the recent past, like within the last 75 years. Many were not even born in the area. They had all traveled over a period of many years from the East and mostly from Southern states. Most had families who dated back to the 1600's and fought in all the American wars from the Revolution on. Part of the reason that they were in this area was that they had been paid over the years with "land warrants" for Western land, first in Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky and later in more Western states. From their common European history, they had a burning desire for land. Owning land was the driving force that brought their forefathers here in the first place and it had not died out. Oklahoma at the turn of the 1900's was one big Indian Reservation with all kinds of tribes that had moved there from the East. It was Indian law that all land was held in common and the penalty was death for any Indian to sell Indian land. This meant that farmers moving into Oklahoma could not buy land, but had to rent it from the Indians and many did. This was "Share Cropping", pure and simple. I don't think that most people realize that "Share cropping" was not just a Black thing. Most poor farmers of the day were "Share Croppers" whether Black or White. I have seen the census records of my family in Oklahoma in 1910 and noticed that the people on the next farm were Black. This was a common situation. At this time most families had a large number of kids and like today, if you have a large number of kids, you are going to be poor. It was no different then, with the exception that all could work on the farm and contribute. By the time these farmers traveled from the East coast to the Oklahoma area, they had lost much of the culture from Europe. They still spoke English with the original accent from where ever they came. The social connection was their religion and their church with many communities just extensions of one or two families. To a large degree they were self sufficient and thus somewhat socially isolated and separate from the rest of the USA. They were different just like there are major differences within our largest cities. By any standard, these people were poor.
As 1929 approached, we were just 10 years out of WW1 and all the deaths of Americans in Europe. These people were very religious and did not see any reason for them to have had to participate in a war that was not of their making nor really affected them. Many of these people were part of the South during the Civil War and not slave owners, but were conscripted to fight for the South in a war that they really had no part of. Many saw WW1 as a repeat where they were called to fight and die in someone elses war. Most just wanted to be left alone and take care of their families the best way that they could. They knew they were poor, but they also had strong backs and a strong will and faith in God. With that alone, they had over 200 years of successfully dealing with life as simple farmers and they were confident they could continue. The one thing that could destroy them was if there was a situation where their strong back and farming ability were of no value and that is exactly what happened. In the past they had strong extended families that could come to the aid of a member who had individually fallen on hard times, but this was different. Everyone was hit with the same problem at the same time. Strong backs, strong will, strong families and a strong faith in God were not a match for the problems that they all faced. In the past situations like this were over in a few seasons so they could tough it out, but not this time. As share croppers, they did not own the land and if they did, who would buy it. If they did own land, most could not keep up payments to the banks and thus the banks had no choice but to foreclose and make them share croppers again at best. Most families held on using up any resources that they had and any personal strength and will as well. It was when all hope was gone that many finally decided that they had to move and move they did. Historically, they had come from the East and had no desire to go back. They only knew that things got better as they moved West and that is what they did this time. We are going to California.
As you can see, we had a large group of people who were all products of a common history, personal and economic situation moving as a group West. I don't think anything like this has happened before or since. The people who were moving West to California were not the same people who had moved to Oklahoma from the East. Their ordeal in Oklahoma dealing with the Dust Bowl had changed them as a people. It had stripped them of the vitality and optimism that had carried them into Oklahoma in the first place. These were the people who were moving west now. Very different from any group of people in American history. It was a very bad situation, but it got worse. These were proud people who were on hard times, but when they got to California, they were "not" welcomed. California had its problems too and did not need more poor destitute people streaming into their state. These new people were not Californians, they were "Oakies" and California wanted them to go back where they came from, but more just came and kept coming. They fell into Oakie camps all over California "separate" from real Californians. These were places similar to the ghettos of Europe in the middle ages. Hunger, death and crime were every where. The strength and pride of the Oakies had failed them. The Black slaves in the South did not have it any worse. Most of the Oakies came by way of Route 66. It splits out in the desert into Route 66 and 466, with 66 going into Los Angeles and 466 going over the mountains into Bakersfield. My family chose 466 and Bakersfield where I was born in the Charity Ward in 1940. We lived in tents and under bridges and carried water in buckets and cooked on coal oil stoves. I remember getting my bath once a week in a wash tub with water heated on the coal oil stove in a big tea kettle. All the kids had boils and roundworms. About twice a year, we were all wormed with a big spoon of sulfur and molasses. I did not know any kids who had shoes. We all knew where to walk where we would not get into bull head stickers. Even with tough feet, you could not walk thru them. Everyone that I knew worked in the farm fields picking, pruning and weeding. During the summer we all camped in the fields or orchards. The best place to camp was near a stream or river where we could catch a few fish and swim and find wood for the camp fires. The hardest part was that we were all looked down on by regular Californians. We looked different and talked different so it was easy to pick us out. When we went to school, none of us boys had shoes so we went bare foot. The other kids asked where our shoes were and we all answered that we had shoes even better than the ones these other kids had, but we left them homes because real boys didn't need shoes. Our feet were tough not like those of sissy boys. I got into fight almost every day at school until I was in about the 5th grade. As a Oakie, you could not take anything off anyone. If they insulted you in any way, it was time to fight. When a person is stripped of everything, they still have at least one thing left before they admit defeat and that is pride. We all had plenty of pride. We did not know what it really was at the time, but all male adults that we know acted the same way so that is how we acted. If you ever came home from school with a bloody nose and did not fight back, you could expect a good hard spanking. Looking back, this reminds me so much of the current situation with Blacks in this country. It is what we did and how we acted and I can see now that it was very destructive as it is within the Black community. When a people feel that they have lost every thing, they still have two things left and one is pride and the other is faith. As an Oakie, we had pride and that was about all we had. If you even lose pride, I don't think you have a real chance to build back. Crime in the Black community, in my opinion, is because they have lost even pride. The Oakies came very close but were able to build back.
I have a good Oakie friend from college who, on merit alone, was able to climb higher than he or his parents or anyone else would have ever thought. He retired a few years ago as the President and Chairman of the Board of a Big Insurance, a company in the top 500 in the world. It was on merit and that is the great thing about this country. Anyone who feels that merit does not count is just not alive and aware of what has built America. I would not disagree that people get ahead on the basis of who they are and who they know, but merit is the main social leveler. As an Oakie, I recognized this fact at an early age. Neither of my parents gradated from high school, but their three kids all graduated from college and with advance degrees. I said earlier that us Oakies were easy to identify by the way we talked. People still seem to look down on people who have a southern accent like our past President George Bush. As a kid, I recognized this and did every thing that I could to eliminate any Oakie accent. It worked. Few people think that I am really an Oakie. I used to live in Buenos Aires and learned to speak Spanish there. To this day people ask me if I am Argentine when I speak Spanish because of my Argentine accent. Lawrence Welk was born and raise in a small town in North Dakota, but still had an accent all of his life. People have to get over accents if they want to be real Americans. As a kid, I was embarrassed because I was an Oakie. As I have research my own personal history, I noticed that many Americans who had Indian blood tried to hide the fact that they were part Indian. I don't know what it was about American Indians, but they did not seem to pass along their Indian characteristics like groups like Black. You could be 90% Indian and still not look Indian, where as, you could be only 10% Black and look Black. I only bring these facts up to show that racial bias is not only Black vs White and it has the same causes and the same cures. Bakersfield is still the center of country and western music because of all the Oakies who moved there. My father worked with Buck Owens in the oil fields around Bakersfield and always told Buck not to give up his "day job". My father could not read music, but was a very good guitar player as were most of my Oakie relatives.
For some reason I saw early that doing well in school was the path out. Oakie life in California was tough and there were few encouragements. You had to be tough and fancy encouragements just made you soft. School was about the only place that you could get any kind of encouragement and I think that might be one of the reasons that I chose to focus on school. From grade school thru high school, I never did any home work. There was just never any time for home work, we had to do real work. The one thing that you could do was to pay attention in class and then do well on tests and that is what I did. That is how I and my brothers climbed out. Now why don't Blacks see this as the path out? Is it because they were driven down one step farther than Oakies? For any society there is a breaking point from which they never recover. It has happened in the past and it can happen again right here in front of us. Is that what happened? I don't ever remember getting anything from the government as a kid. If someone got something from the church or some other place, they had so much pride that they would either keep it secret or pass it along to someone who was worse off than themselves. People had pride and that was how they dealt with charity. I never saw anyone with their hand out. It did not happen. I just can't understand how we have changed as a country. Is it as simple as that we have lost our personal pride? I know one thing and that when you find the answer, it is always very simple. Loss of pride just might be it. I know for a fact that us Oakies may have lost everything, but we never lost our pride.
One final comment. The Oakies could have fallen into several different distructive areas, but for some reason they did not. The same can not be said for the Blacks in the USA. They endured a very similar situation to the Oakies. Some may disagree, but I feel that both fell to the bottom with only pride left to show them the way out. The difference is that Blacks fell into several self distructive paterns. We all know what those are. Crime, durgs and out of wedlock births and the main ones. exactly why this happened, I don't know, but it was clearly not imposed from the outside. Oakies saw school as one of the ways out, but the Blacks have activly tried to discourage excellence in school. Oakies favored baseball as their sport while Blacks favored basketball. Oakies grew out of their love of baseball and only used it as a temporary diversion. Blacks seem to have made basketball an obsession to the neglect of activities what would have served them better. Oakies were forced for a time into urban areas, but never liked the idea and only saw it as temporary until they could get back to the land. For some reason Blacks came to enjoy the urban situation and avoided rural life close to the land. Looking at all these factors, one starts to see how two similar groups chose different paths and were yielded different results. I don't have any solutions, but just clear observations.
