by Philipp Blom
Buried hopes: After a dust storm in South Dakota, 1936.
Nature did not allow them to forget for long. Growing anything became almost impossible. As nothing but withered stalks was left where there once had been fields of shoulder-high wheat, even irrigated vegetables did not escape the deadly hand of the weather. Huge buildups of static electricity from the storms devastated these crops, turning watermelons black and wheat brown within hours.
As the landscape turned into a scorching inferno, hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits descended from the open plains into the fields and razed the little that was left of the stunted harvest. They came in droves so vast that it seemed as if the baked earth itself was migrating in the dizzy heat. On Sundays, after church, farmers would congregate for rabbit drives and kill hundreds or thousands of animals, first with shot, and then, when that proved too costly and too dangerous for other hunters, with clubs.
After the jackrabbits came the clouds of grasshoppers, tiny eating machines that could not be clubbed to death. After the grasshoppers came hopelessness. Already the fields had lost up to five inches of precious topsoil, transformed into dust drifts dotting the landscape like a ghostly Gobi Desert. In the Texas panhandle, residents found a crow’s nest built out of rusty barbed wire, the only building material the birds had been able to find on the arid plains. One hundred million acres had become a wasteland.
Sometimes the skies were so dark that it seemed to be night for twenty-four hours, while high winds could blow five days in a row. People were living with cloth masks in front of their faces, and a new form of pneumonia was sweeping the countryside. Undernourished and weakened from the constant threat, children fell sick and began to die. Reporting for the New York Times, George Greenfield wrote from Kansas: “Today I have seen the cold hand of death on what was one of the great bread baskets of the nation . . . a lost people living on a lost land.”4
The poet Archibald MacLeish was horrified by what he saw. He understood that the catastrophe had been caused not just by a freak of nature but also by a destructive interpretation of the American dream, an exploitative, aggressive hunt for profits that had exposed the earth to the elements and the farmers to misery. The great ideas of the founding fathers, he implied, had been perverted.
We wonder whether the dream of American liberty
Was two hundred years of pine and hardwood
And three generations of the grass
And the generations are up: the years over . . .
We wonder whether the great American dream
Was the singing of locusts out of the grass to
the West and the
West is behind us now . . .
We wonder if the liberty is done:
The dreaming is finished.5
Leaving Home
WITH NO SUBSTANTIAL RAINFALL in four years and no change in sight, families began to give up, packing up what little they had left and leaving. By the second half of the 1930s, the trek had swollen to fifty thousand people every month beating a path west. They did not shut their doors behind them, but just drove away, their remaining possessions piled on their pickup trucks: a few sticks of furniture, pots and pans, beans and corn flour, bundles of ragged clothes, and spare water, gasoline, and tires. In a contemporary documentary, a family’s two children are shown simply sitting on the back of the truck, looking back, their bare feet dangling over the hot dust. Those who had no trucks braved the barren heat and the hundreds of miles of road ahead of them on bicycles.
Almost half a million men, women, and children took to the road westward, hoping for a new beginning. The main artery for this great migration was the newly completed Route 66, running from Chicago to Santa Monica Pier in California. A desolate caravan of “Okies” (originally short for “Oklahomans”) trudged westward along its long straight stretches and winding hills. After spending days on the road making their way through arid wastelands, the distressed travelers would spot the first green again—the first trees, fertile fields, and flowers they had seen in years. They were going to a landscape of gardens with pleasant weather and two harvests a year. They would find work in the orchards, or even buy a little land and start over.
They were not welcome. The United States was in the midst of the Depression, and bread lines in the big cities stretched for several blocks, while men who had run their own businesses were now begging in the streets and sleeping rough. Andrew Mellon, the multimillionaire secretary of the treasury, had what he saw as a patent medicine against economic crises, and he saw to it that it was implemented. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness of the system. . . . People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”6 But the bread lines grew longer. They would not begin to decrease until Roosevelt’s New Deal instituted a series of public works programs that began to revive the economy in the mid-1930s. Even then, the climate would remain tough for those who had left their homes to look for work.
Having been celebrated as pioneering heroes in advertising and public speeches only a generation earlier, the Okies suddenly found themselves abused on the streets, chased away when they pitched their tents or built their huts, and paid less than a living wage, if they found work at all. In the gigantic California orchards, there were four immigrants applying for every job, and even the lucky would earn too little to make ends meet. When they rebelled, they were cruelly treated. Trade unionists and “troublesome” men were sacked without protection, and strikes were beaten down, with the strike leaders frequently jailed or even shot.
In the best case, the Okies were portrayed as primitive, Bible-thumping hillbillies. Vice President Henry Wallace gleefully told of an encounter with a recent arrival in California, whom he would imitate: “Well, Mister, I was farmin’ back ther in Oklyhomy and it jist kep a gittin’ droughthier and droughthier, and droughthier so . . . Here I be.”7
On many occasions, however, the abuse was far worse. A businessman in the San Joaquin Valley called the newcomers “ignorant filthy people” and opined that they should never “think they’re as good as the next man,” a sentiment that was echoed by many Californians, who labeled the newcomers as “shiftless trash who live like hogs.” A doctor in Kern County was baffled by them, calling them “a strange people—they don’t seem to know anything. They can’t read at all. . . . There is such a thing as a breed of people. These people have lived separate for too long, and they are like a different race.” The celebrity journalist H. L. Mencken, notorious for loudly disagreeing with almost everyone, for once concurred, and recommended that all Okies be sterilized.8
The prejudice about simple-minded, indolent Okies of inferior stock was in part a revival of well-established attitudes toward blacks, and even well-meaning people helped to perpetuate them. A schoolteacher believed herself a shrewd judge of character when she remarked: “I can spot a migrant on the street every time by watching him walk. He shuffles. He doesn’t hold up his shoulders and face the world. His glance is often timid and wandering. I say these things, not harshly, but with sorrow. Generations of living as the underdog has made him like a scared bush rabbit.”9
Edward Everett Davis, a professor of agriculture in Texas, gave this idea more implicitly racist implications when he drew an apocalyptic picture of the rural South: “Below us lies a cotton field, the great open air slum of the south, a perennial Hades of poverty, ignorance, and social depravity. . . . Too much of America’s worthless human silt has filtered into the cotton belt. . . . The most serious rural problem in the South is . . . that of the biologically impoverished tribes of marginal humanity—black, white and Mexican—subsisting on cotton. . . . The human creature of weak body and moronic mentality who would perish without reproducing his hideous kind amid the blizzards and wheat fields of the Dakotas can survive successfully and populate half a schoolroom in the mild cotton regions of Texas.”10
> The new migrants were humiliated, and also surprised. They were, after all, white, of Anglo-Saxon stock, and strictly Protestant. They had anticipated that the going might be rough in their new home, but they had never expected to be treated as second-class human beings. In John Steinbeck’s great novel The Grapes of Wrath an old man reflects: “Well, Okie use’ta to mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it.”11
And perhaps the Okies were despised for another reason. They were the ragged, living embodiment of a great dream failing due to shortsighted greed, reckless exploitation of resources, and priorities dictated by profits. They were proof that the American dream could collapse not only due to bad luck or lack of ability or determination but also through a flaw in the vision itself, through the lure of the quick buck and the siren voice of untold fortunes just around the corner.
Building Empathy
HELP DID COME FROM THE GOVERNMENT, but it was cruelly little. In the end, the tide of public opinion was turned by artists. The sympathetic portrayal of the sharecroppers in Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road gained the book huge popularity; a Broadway play based on it opened in the following year, playing to full houses for eight straight years. Even its great success was eclipsed in 1938 with the publication of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, a searing indictment of the hopelessness and humiliation of the rural migrants who had lost everything, only to be abandoned by a greed-filled society.
Steinbeck blamed the Dust Bowl catastrophe on a system blinded by profits and estranged from nature. “The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his element knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.”12
By the end of the decade, Steinbeck’s migrant tragedy would sell 430,000 copies and still be on the bestseller list. It owed its status in part to its charged political tone. Whereas many readers felt compassion for the characters and their plight, others were convinced that the author’s engagement with the dregs of humanity was nothing short of socialist and smacked of revolution. The Associated Farmers of California were particularly outraged about the treatment of their colleagues in the novel, hotly denouncing it as “communist propaganda.” Copies of the book were publicly burned. Other reviewers expressed a more balanced opinion. The critic for the New York Times reflected: “All this is true enough but the real truth is that Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart with a sincerity seldom equaled. It may be an exaggeration, but it is the exaggeration of an honest and splendid writer.”13
Madonna of the Dust Bowl: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of a refugee with two of her children, 1936.
But the task of creating the most complete and most iconic record of the hopeless misery of the Okies fell to the photographers. In 1935, the Farm Security Administration was set up under the terms of the New Deal to alleviate rural poverty. Roy Striker, one of its civil servants, had begun to employ a loose group of young photojournalists—among others Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Arthur Rothstein—to document the destruction of agricultural assets and of human lives that was taking place. Striker wanted to move the hearts of his fellow citizens and to record the success of relief efforts, and he ended up doing this and much more.
In the film documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, Striker explained to the American public how intensive farming was partly to blame for the unfolding ecological disaster. Using the photographs of gifted observers such as Rothstein and Lange, he presented the human side of the economic and ecological catastrophe. It was Dorothea Lange who captured the single most famous image of the Dust Bowl refugees, a portrait of a mother and her two children taken in an improvised California camp. Perhaps more than anything else, this modern Madonna helped to build a broad consensus to mobilize more government funds to aid the stricken region, to which the rain would return only in autumn 1939.
Safe Havens
THE OKIES WERE NOT THE ONLY MIGRANTS let down by Depression-era America, and while they were looked down on, they were still US citizens. For all those wanting to come from the outside, things were harder still. Once the world’s premier goal for immigration, the United States had become progressively closed to new arrivals. After the crash, as life grew ever harder for many of those just off the boats, America had for the first time in its history become a country of emigration. In 1921, net migration (immigration minus emigration) had stood at 557,000; in 1925, the year after the Immigration Act, the figure was 201,000. But in 1931, with the country bludgeoned by the Depression, 68,000 people more left the United States than entered it, admitting defeat and returning home. Among them was the Italian Michele Schirru, anarchist and would-be assassin of Mussolini.
In Europe, another gigantic, choking cloud had risen up from what once was good, fertile soil, darkening the skies and threatening to bury all that was in its shadow: Hitler’s Nazi Germany. It also triggered a wave of migration. Jews and those of liberal or leftist views in Germany and Austria, which at the time had its own fascist regime, were increasingly despairing at the possibility of a future in their home country and planning to move abroad. Visa restrictions to most countries were such that victims of persecution soon resolved to go anywhere they could, if only they were let in. The situation in Germany had been becoming increasingly alarming for Jews, and the 1935 Race Laws, which forbade everything from cinema attendance by Jews to intermarriage and Jewish ownership of property, had given the final push. More than ever, potential emigrants besieged embassies, desperate for the elusive visas.
Recent history, however, had resulted in tight visa regulations almost everywhere. Initially, interwar Europe had seen an intense period of internal migration. The crumbling of four empires (German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman) after the First World War had resulted in nationalist campaigns and the vicious settling of old scores. In eastern Turkey, more than one million Armenians had been butchered in a vast campaign of what would decades later be termed “ethnic cleansing” shot through with centuries of ethnic hatred, especially on the side of Kurdish militants, whose infamous Hamidiye Brigade was responsible for a large proportion of the often savage mass killings.
The Turkish and Greek populations in disputed areas of the eastern Mediterranean had been engaged in mutual skirmishing and increasing bloodshed, which culminated in the 1922 Smyrna Massacre of the Greek population. White Russians had fled the revolution in their own country, and minorities of Germans, Hungarians, Tyrolians, Slovenes, Irish, Finns, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics had fled local oppression, while millions of economic migrants were continuing to seek better lives for themselves in the big cities or in the industrial areas of other countries. Europe had been in a state of tremendous and often murderous upheaval of entire populations.
Only the last waves of this flood of displacement and misery washed into western European countries, where life was precarious but less uprooted. For Jewish Germans (and soon afterward for Jewish Austrians), this feeling of relative security had ended abruptly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the implementation of the Race Laws two years later. Some Jews went from Berlin to Vienna or, more frequently, the other way, in the hope of finding a more tolerant climate and some professional opportunities. Others went further afield. Believing they could ride out the time of Hitler’s dictatorship, which many still thought of as a brief moment of madness in Germany’s history, many Jewish Germans and Austrians, along with many non-Jewish but committed anti-Nazi citizens of those countries, moved to Paris, London, Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, or even Moscow in an attem
pt to evade persecution.
In Paris, the languid and glamorous “lost generation” of American writers was replaced by another, less fashionable, more anxious group. A “Little Germany,” consisting of bookshops and delicatessens, arose there during the 1930s. In the first months after Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor in 1933, some 26,000 Germans, most of them Jewish, had left Germany for Paris. By 1940 some 150,000 Jews, communists and socialists, painters and poets, journalists, musicians, and businessmen had come to France. Some awaited a visa to their final destination; others sought passage to any safe country. Many went on their way as soon as they could, but others stayed, waiting for some ray of hope, or simply for the storm clouds to pass.
In the grip of the Depression and enduring often bloody warfare between the radical factions of the right and left, France was not a welcoming land for immigrants. The public mood was hostile to newcomers. Jewish arrivals were often regarded with special suspicion by the citizens of a society that had been rent by the anti-Semitic extravagances of the Dreyfus affair at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1934, the scandal surrounding the Polish-born Jewish financier Alexandre Stavisky, whose embezzlement of millions of francs had led to his apparent murder by the police, had further stoked public anti-Semitism, to the extent that extreme right-wing organizations such as the Croix-de-Feu were openly calling for France to adopt the same attitude toward Jews and left-wing radicals as Nazi Germany had done.