The Okie Exodus
Between 1930 and 1940, California experienced a net in-migration of almost 315,000 Okie migrants from what social historian James Gregory terms the ‘Western South’ primarily the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. By the end of the 1930s, almost 11% of the total population of California traced their place of birth to one of these Okie states. Although the number of migrants arriving in California during the Great Depression decade paralleled the Okie in-migration of the 1920s (estimated to be approximately 250,000), the migrants of the 1930s drew much greater attention (Gregory 1989).
Scholarly work has extensively chronicled the ‘push-factors’ of the Depression-Era migration and emphasized the difficult economic circumstances faced by the Okie migrants in their home states. Donald Worster (1979) characterizes the outpouring of people from the Western South as the culmination of a growing capitalist economy in the United States. Although originally premised upon Jeffersonian ideals of the self-supporting yeoman farmer, the land of the Great Plains ultimately became a commodity fit for exchange in a new profit-driven agricultural economy. The consequences of the mechanized agriculture that ensued, Paul Bonnifield (1979) notes, were ecologically and economically devastating. Mechanization initiated the ‘great plow up,’ but also resulted in farm sizes rising dramatically to compensate for the costs associated with purchasing and maintaining the equipment. Farm debt soared while the increasing reliance on a mono-crop system of wheat agriculture was further complicated by periodic drought (Worster 1979; Bonnifield 1979; Riney-Kehrberg 1989; Opie 1998).
Interestingly, the people usually associated with the Dust Bowl migration to California, historically referred to as ‘Okies’ and ‘Dust Bowl’ migrants, were rarely from the most drought stricken and dust-storm plagued area of the Oklahoma panhandle. Rather, most migrants originated from the poverty-ridden, non-dust-storm afflicted areas of Okahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri. In fact, less than 6% (16,000 people) of the known Depression-era migrants bound for California were from what Bonnifield designates as the ecological region characterized by overpowering dust storms. Despite the lack of dust clouds to force them onto the highways westward, the Okie migrants of the 1930s were nonetheless subject to the same economic forces as those in the dust-bowl region (Bonnifield 1979; Worster 1979; Manes 1982; Gregory 1989). According to the 1941 US House of Representatives Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens (Tolan Report), farm mechanization and enlarged farm size played the most significant role in the displacement of population from the Western South (US Congress, House, 1941).
Factory-farms had come to dominate agricultural production and in turn reduced the ability of small farms to compete economically. In addition, the ranks of Okie migrants were swelled due to the changing state of farm tenancy. By the 1930, almost 73% of all cotton farms were occupied by tenant farmers (Turner 1937, pp. 424-428). Moreover tenant farming in this cotton-growing region was also characterized by a high turnover rate and subsequently a mobile tenant population (US Congress, House 1941).
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