Sixty years ago an eager crowd gathered on Chester Avenue in Bakersfield, California to destroy a novel. They cheered as the local farmers dropped the book into bright flames reaching up over the lip of a metal garbage can. They cheered as the pages of the controversial novel were consumed by the fire.

The crowd wanted to get rid of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath because they didn't like the history it described. They burned it, and then they banned it from the local libraries. They called Steinbeck's book "obscene," and they called it "vile propaganda." The migrant workers who had lived it, however, called it reality. And the town of Bakersfield could not hide it from the world.

Three weeks after it was published, The Grapes of Wrath exploded on the best seller lists, and since then has sold fourteen million copies. It astounded the nation with a fictional story about a very real experience: 400,000 people leaving the Dust Bowl states of middle America to look for work in California during the Great Depression.

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel, describing the journey west for the fictional Joad family, but it realistically documents the harsh lifestyle of what could have been any Okie's story. After reading the book, Irene and I went to Bakersfield to learn more about the experience from those who had lived it. Although there's no museum or historic markers there yet, historian Dorris Weddell led us to Earl Shelton, a friendly face eager to share his personal story and describe the hardships these strong migrants had overcome.

We could have spent days listening to the stories Earl has to tell. It takes little prompting to get him started, and then his enthusiasm for sharing his life history explodes. He has lived through extreme poverty, discrimination and heartache, but has come through these experiences with an amazing attitude and ever-present smile. Irene and I hang on every animated word as he walks us through his past. We laugh and nod and shake our heads in wonder at the life he has led.

Earl is an Okie. Earl wears this name with pride, along with his cowboy boots, silver belt buckle, and southern accent as a badge of strength and endurance. 60 years ago, however, the term Okie was a derrogatory slur. It was said with a disgusted sneer, and used to insult the poor famers who moved to California in search of a better life. These migrants were called Okies because they mostly came from Oklaholma. They also came from Texas and Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri, but they were all lumped together into a group looked down upon as "Okies." Together, these 400,000 Okies participated in the largest migration the United States has ever seen, and their experience gives us a good reason to reevaluate how we treat people who are in need.

Doris Weddell is making a difference.

The Okies stuck out in California because they talked with funny accents, wore strange, baggy overalls and cheap canvas shoes, and were covered in dirt and dust because they had no place to bathe. The locals hated them because they were different, and because they were scared. The locals claimed that the Okies "were stealing jobs in the state while they bankrupted its relief system," and they were worried that their own jobs, their own income, house and health might disappear too.

Although it was tough to be treated with such contempt, staying in the Dust Bowl would have been tougher. The once-fertile land had literally turned into useless dust. According to Todd Kapler's "People and Environmental Change" website, the Dust Bowl occurred because of poor farming and years of drought. Kapler describes what happened: [The] Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the skies. The sky could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

Like so many other familes living there, Earl's family simply couldn't make a living off the land there anymore. Rather than stay and starve in this desolate climate, Earl and his father followed his brothers to California.

Earl and the other Okies dreamed of a new life in California, where peaches and apples and peas and oranges were ready to pick year-round. With pamphlets in hand promising good jobs and a perfect climate, the Oakies headed west on Route 66, the famous "Mother Road" that stretched all the way from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California. Families from the Dust Bowl bought old pickup trucks with the money they made from selling their farm equiptment and furniture, and packed in whatever they possibly fit in the car. After strapping their mattresses to the pile of precious belongings, the children climbed on top. Then the families began their hot and dirty 2,000 mile journey west. Many did not have enough money to pay for gas or food for their trek, and so they looked for work as they traveled. Often they stopped in a town for days or weeks until they could earn enough money to continue on. Earl was seven when he made the trip, and although he doesn't remember ever going hungry himself, he tells us that he's sure his dad did. There was certainly no money for hotels, and so along the way they "cooked outside, slept outside, went to the bathroom in the woods, bathed when they could, and did whatever it took to get to the next day." Tent towns would spring up alongside the road each night, and Steinbeck describes that "every night a world [was] created," complete with furniture, friends and enemies, "and every morning the world [was] torn down like a circus" (250).

After weeks of braving the hot sun and the twisting roads, the strain of climbing mountains and the frustration of a car that continued to break down, the Okies would reach the Tehachapi Overlook. There they stopped their cars to take in the beauty of Central California's San Joaquin Valley. To Earl, the sight was "breathtaking." The miles of lush, green crops looked exactly like what they had dreamed of, and the sight of the magnificent valley brought hope once again to the exhausted and hungry, sun-baked, dirt-stained, penniless Okies. Their arrival in this valley of plenty however, was a rude awakening. This land was not available to them -- it was all owned by a few wealthy landowners. The Okies could not buy it, nor could they sharecrop it. There was no place for them to live, and no way for these migrants to earn a steady income. It was a simple problem of numbers. The California farmers had knowingly printed up too many flyers advertising for too few jobs. When the Okies showed up by the thousands, there just weren't enough jobs available. Those that could find jobs weren't paid a living wage. Since the California farmers had such an enormous group of people willing to labor in their fields, they could chose to pay any wages they wanted to - there was always someone willing to work at the lowest pay he offered. This situation kept the Okies from earning enough to settle down. They were always on the move looking for work. Earl tells us that "when there was a nickel to be made, that's where we went. But then you'd get there and there'd be too many people" who wanted the same job you did, and you'd have to pick up and move again to find something else.

So they continued to live on the side of the roads, in makeshift camps called Okievilles. They looked for work during the day, praying they would make enough money to feed their families for the night.
The conditions in the Okievilles were terrible. When the Joads arrive at one, Tom looks around "at the grimy tents, the junk equipment, at the old cars, the lumpy mattresses out in the sun, at the blackened cans on fire-blackened holes where the people cooked," and realizes for the first time that his family may have left poverty in Oklahoma only to find it again in California. The police would come to the camps often to break them up, beat them up, and move the Okies out. Tom Joad talks to a character in Grapes who believes that the police and the farmers kept the Okies moving so they could never gain power. "Some says they don' want us to vote; keep us movin' so we can't vote. An' some says so we can't get on relief. An' some says if we set in one place we'd get organized. I don't know why. I on'y know we get rode all the time" (314).

When the economy goes bad, people get scared. During the Depression, people were frightened that they would not be able to support their own families, and they looked for someone to blame for their misfortunes. In California, the Okies were the easiest scapegoat. Often turned away from the California border by the Los Angeles police force because they had no money, no place to live, and no jobs, the Okies had to brush off cruel predjudices that attacked them from all sides. They were denied medical treatment and encountered signs like the one at a Bakersfield movie theater demanding "Niggers and Okies upstairs." Californians told themselves that "We got to keep these here people down or they'll take the country... Sure they talk the same language, but they ain't the same" (303). People dehumanized them, which made it easier to stand by and watch them suffer. One man in Grapes complains that "Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live like they do. A human being couldn't stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain't a hell of a lot better than gorillas" (284). Do these terrible words sound familiar? Depending on the decade or region you choose, they could have been used by a plantation owner against a black slave, by a colonist against a Native American, by a New Englander against an Irish immigrant, or by a white supremacist against a Jew, a Latino, or an Asian. Over and over again we find that people who are not happy or confident themselves boost themselves up by tearing others down. Will we ever learn?

Luckily, some people did learn, and they recognized that what was happening to the Okies was horribly wrong. So in 1936, the federal government finally intervened. Rather than watch the local police and farmers antagonize the Okies and ensure their misery, they decided to do something about the squalor of the Okievilles. The Farm Security Administration created 10 government-run camps where families could set up their tents for $1.25 a week. The camps provided garbage pick up, running water, and modern, flush-toilet bathrooms. They seemed like heaven, "the end of the rainbow" Doris says, to Okies who had been living in dirt and disease and fear in their makeshift roadside campsites. Steinbeck based the Weedpatch Camp in his book on his visits to the Arvin Farm Labor Supply Center near Bakersfield, and the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath was actually filmed on-location at the camp.

Earl moved into the Arvin Camp in 1941, and lived there on and off for 13 years. He and his father and brother eventually moved from tent space #529 to a tin house. He tells overwhelmingly happy stories of life at the camp and even compares the rec hall there to the fun kids have at Magic Mountain today. There were magic shows and basketball games, dances and drama, pie suppers, cake walks, weddings and movies -- all to be enjoyed at the rec hall. Touring the camp with Earl is a powerful experience. He points out where the gas pumps used to be where he was lucky to find work as a 12 year old. He climbs into a tin cabin and exclaims about the heat in the summer, and shows us holes where people had nailed up pictures and posters to make their space at camp seem more like home. He remembers the orange crates and apple boxes that served as their furniture. He points to the post office, the library, the manager's office, each building calling up a memory for him of his time spent there.

Earl then tells us of the amazing school, started by two passionate educators, that was literally built from the ground up by the children themselves. Bakersfield parents did not want the Okie children in their schools, so Superintendent Leo Hart decided the Okie children should have their own. Bright young teachers from all over were brought in to teach the basic classes, but also to teach the children life skills and technical skills. It was a special place for the Okie children, where they were not made fun of for their accents or their clothes, and where people believed in their abilities, intelligence and creativity. The school had its own garden to produce most of the food served in the cafeteria. It acquired extra airplanes from the military, and used them as classrooms, teaching aircraft maintenance to the excited Okie children. They even dug their own swimming pool. Earl loves to talk about this place and tells us that "there will never be another school like it." Check out the wonderful book Children of the Dust Bowl by Jerry Stanley for the complete, and incredible, history of the school.

Government camps like Arvin and the school the children built there reminded me that despite the heartless behavior of the farmers, there were many caring, compassionate people who wanted to give the Okies a fair, fighting chance at survival. Doris thanks "liberal thinkers" for the creation of these relief systems, without whom we never would have had "the projects that fed people."

So what happened to the Okies? Well, as they say, "War is good for the economy," and eventually World War II and the defense industry provided jobs for most of the surplus farm laborers. One generation after their arrival in California, you won't find an Okieville anywhere. Earl and the other Okie children have worked their way through school and into good jobs. They are a success story, and have left the starvation, poverty, disease and cruelty they grew up with behind them.

Then there are the farmers who played games with the Okies' lives, living off the labor of a people who were too hungry, and too tired to demand what they deserved. Are they embarrassed? They must be! These farmers were too eager to control the ideas and thoughts that they did not agree with, the tale they were not proud to see told. I believe that they must recognize their wrongdoings, for by burning and banning history they tried to destroy the evidence of their guilt. But I wonder, as they cheered for its' destruction, did their cruelties really burn into black wisps of smoke with the pages of Steinbeck's book?

Rebecca

Please email me at: rebecca@ustrek.org