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I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore: Why the Joads Left

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I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore: Why the Joads Left I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore Why the Joads Left Oklahoma and What They Found in California by Jerry James Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. ― Herman Melville The Dust Bowl. The Depression. We see them together, intermixed with grainy, black-and- white images from an old movie or a Ken Burns documentary, with a soundtrack of Woody Guthrie songs. They ride along with John Steinbeck’s Joad family on its journey from Oklahoma to California. Yet despite these events being the worst manmade disasters in American history, they actually had little direct impact on the Joads’ decision to immigrate. THE DUST BOWL In 1807, the leader of a US Army expedition called the Great Plains “uninhabitable by a ground. The sod it formed withstood drought people depending upon agriculture for and weather extremes, ecologically perfect for subsistence.” But the short grass that grew on herds of buffalo. Native Americans thrived those plains sent its roots five feet into the there. 1 When the buffalo was gone, the cattlemen sharecropper’s life, migrated west, eventually took over. They called it the Beef Bonanza, until owning a cotton farm. And that Pa Joad lost the a series of severe winters in the 1880s killed off farm, doubtless when cotton prices dropped their herds. Some saw an opportunity. “Real from 17¢ a pound in 1925 to 9¢ in 1926 to 5¢ in estate syndicates began buying big ranches for 1930. The Joads then joined the 61% of $5 an acre and carving them up into smaller Oklahoma cotton farmers who by 1930 had parcels for sale at three times the price,” Dayton become tenants on the land they once owned. Duncan wrote. The land companies had a clear vision, which Thus came the small farmers, moving from a is always easier when it doesn’t factor in people. more humid climate to a place that averaged less Their tenants weren’t producing enough cotton, than twenty inches of rain a year. Shortly after because cotton had depleted the soil. The only Indian Territory was legally eliminated with the sound economic policy, therefore, was to plow Oklahoma Land Rush of 1890, there was a six- up every square inch of the land in order to year drought. extract every last cent of its value. Not only The farmers of the Southern Plains paid little would this return to cultivation the land on heed, believing that “rain follows the plow.” In which tenants had made their homes, it would what would become the Dust Bowl, they grew also “tractor off” the tenants, thereby wheat. Further east, around the Joad farm near eliminating any need to split the company’s Sallisaw, the crop was cotton. But whatever the income. In a bitter irony, this large-scale, crop, most of these farms were sized to Eastern mechanized farming would prove to be the only standards, and so were too small for long-term way agriculture was economically feasible in success. Rather, they desperately hung on, the area. hoping that “next year” would be better. And because the region was over-reliant on And in 1914, “next year” came: the farmers agriculture, there were no other local jobs the were saved by World War I. With Russian evicted tenants might take from which they wheat blockaded by the Germans, agriculture could bad-mouth the land companies. In order to mobilized to feed the Allies at $2 a bushel, live, they were going to have to self-deport. twice the former price. And the rains came, and These problems had all been present during more land went under the plow, and everyone the “prosperous” 1920s. A 1940 Oklahoma state made money. Even when the price went back to commission’s report on the migration never $1 after the war, a farmer could still do well, if mentions the Depression. For the Joads, the he owned a tractor. During the last five years of Depression was simply the final straw, the one the 1920s more than five million acres, an area that broke their backs. the size of New Hampshire, was bought up and Steinbeck was not conventionally religious, plowed under. but it is interesting to note that as his Joads By 1930, the price of wheat had dropped to prepare for their exodus (which will feature a 70¢ a bushel. So the farmers plowed up another desert crossing), they take with them a man who half-million acres in order to keep their incomes says he isn’t a preacher, just somebody who’s stable. Then came the drought, and after it the been out wandering in the wilderness, whence wind, and then the dust. he has returned with a doctrine akin to New The Dust Bowl was named by an AP reporter England Transcendentalism and quoting in 1936. That same year, Pare Lorentz released William Blake. This man, whose initials are JC, his documentary, The Plow That Broke The will later sacrifice himself. And at the saga’s Plains. The title was a bitter pun. end, following a flood straight out of Genesis and in the midst of death, a Joad will perform an THE JOADS act of grace so amazing that it heralds a near- All we know of the Joad family’s past is that rebirth—in a barn, yet. Grampa’s grampa fought in the Revolution. We Joad is an English name, but the family’s can infer that Grampa, scorning a dirt-poor behavior marks them as Scots-Irish, the cheap- 2 labor backbone of this country since Jamestown. The Okies didn’t go to Los Angeles, nor to They are quick to anger, resistant to authority any other urban area. They were farm people, and devoted to family. White Protestants of not city folk, so they turned north off Route 66 Anglo-Saxon descent, the Joads actually live and found a kind of agriculture vastly different Rabbi Hillel’s great commandment, as reiterated from any they had known. by Jesus of Nazareth: Love thy neighbor as Through various forms of chicanery dating thyself. (Ma Joad’s first action is to invite two from California statehood (1850), land supposed strangers to share the family’s meal.) ownership in the Great Central and Imperial In California, they will meet several self- Valleys had long been concentrated in a very professed Christians who observe this rule only few hands. In collaboration with the legislature, in its breach. millions of dollars for irrigation had magically appeared, and the Farm Bureau Federation and its successor, the Associated Farmers of California (AFC), ruled unchallenged over the state’s major agricultural regions. Years before the land company that evicted the Joads existed, the AFC had perfected the Factory Farm. The Factory Farm needed labor, of course, but the labor had to be concentrated in the short period of time it took to harvest each crop. After trying and discarding Chinese, Hindus and Japanese workers, the AFC had settled on Mexicans (including Mexican-Americans). The Mexicans would mysteriously show up just as the crop was ready for picking, pick it and— best of all—disappear until the next year. In reality, this meant that the workers would migrate from crop to crop as each ripened, then return to Los Angeles or other “Mexican CALIFORNIA Towns” around larger cities and spend the rest Since the days of the Gold Rush, California of the year on relief. had depended on “westering”— migration from When the Okies arrived, the AFC’s first the rest of the country. Its rank among the states st th question was, Would they work for Mexican jumped from 21 in 1900 to 8 in 1920. And in wages? They would—and for less—because the 1920s, almost two million more people unlike the Mexicans, they had nowhere else to moved there, increasing the population by an go. Also, until one had lived in California for a astonishing 66%. year, one could not apply for relief. The AFC These immigrants were the Right Kind, was delighted. exemplified by retired accountants who settled The Okies were not. They were White in Los Angeles. Many of the million immigrants Protestants of Anglo-Saxon descent, like their who arrived in the following decade were not employers. Surely the privilege of their skin the Right Kind. And despite the fact that only a would afford them some respect. The AFC third of these were from Oklahoma, Texas and laughed. If you worked for Mexican wages, you neighboring states, with just 16,000 from the would be treated like a Mexican. Or worse, Dust Bowl itself, they were all called “Okies,” a because any white man who would work for term first given wide distribution by a news Mexican wages was obviously not really white, story of the mid-1930s. The writer saw the OK but a member of a subspecies—the Okie. on the license plates and used the term as a In contemporary accounts, Walter J. Stein descriptive. Soon, it would become a pejorative. observed in 1973, “The Okie was 3 simultaneously accused of ‘shiftlessness’ and on March 14, 1939 with the dedication, “To lack of ambition and of ‘stealing jobs’ from Carol, who willed this book; To Tom, who lived Native Californians.” And now, the AFC fumed, it.” the Farm Security Administration was building The novel landed in California with the camps for them, as if they were human beings. delicacy of a Molotov cocktail.
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