copyright Hershel Parker
26 June 2022
"Goddamn Okies" -- How “Okie”
became a Hate Term
In
the mid-1930s, journalists did not know where the refugees or migrants
streaming into California were coming from. From the “Dust Bowl,” said many,
not realizing that the true Dust Bowl was pretty much restricted to the
panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and the adjacent areas in those states and to
northeast New Mexico, southeast Colorado, and southwest Kansas. Journalists did
not know, either, that far from everyone who left the Dust Bowl actually went
to California. On 14 July 1937 the San Bernardino County Sun under
the headline “70,000 ‘Dust Bowl’ Refugees Homeless in San Joaquin Valley”
identified the newcomers as from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, not knowing
that although Arkansas had suffered drought it was not in the Dust Bowl. On 25
July 1937 the Fresno Bee reported concern about “the influx of
middle westerners and dust bowl refugees”—maybe 1,000,000 of them, but did not
particularize “middle westerners.” The Burlingame Times on 28
July 1937 under the heading “Cotton Crop Here Lure To Dust Bowl Refugees”
declared that “many thousands of southern farmers and refugees from the
midwestern ‘dust bowl’ have invaded the San Joaquin valley.” Again, “southern”
and “midwestern ‘dust bowl’” were not further specified. An article by Sam
Jackson in the Charleston (South Carolina) News and Courier on
8 August 1937 said that officials were surprised that “migration from the
western dust bowl has increased in 1937”—an estimated influx of 100,000 as
compared to 84,000 in 1936; “western dust bowl” was not further
located. The Santa Cruz Sentinel on 8 April 1938
announced that “Dust Bowl Migrants Are Roaming State for Work” and went on to
specify that the migrants had been “cut loose from their farms in Oklahoma,
Texas and Arkansas by disaster and mechanization of farming.” The El Paso Herald-Post on
28 July 1938 (“Dust Bowl Migrants Squat On California in Squalor”) quoted
migrants’ explanations for why they had left their homes: they were not able to
make a living on a farm, they staying on a farm till the dust drove them out,
they stayed till the drought ran them out. The reporter continued: “These are
typical answers as the inquiring visitor makes the rounds of California’s
squatter tent and shack towns, inhabited by one-time share croppers, tenant
farmers, independent farmers, casual[tie]s of depression in towns—nomads who
have migrated here from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona
and elsewhere in search of work and mild winters.”
“Okies”
had been the innocuous nickname of the Norman football team and had been
current in jocular use for themselves among other Oklahomans. Even before The
Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1937, the two terms “Okies” and
“Arkies” covered most of the migrants although “Okies” was becoming the
catch-all term. After John Steinbeck peppered the latter half of his book
“goddamn Okies,” not a term that could be repeated in newspapers, but gradually
the term darkened and the migrants began to be identified as coming mainly from
Oklahoma. On 8 August 1937 the Charleston News and Courier printed
this caption to a grim illustration: “Crowding of families in ‘jungle’ tents,
like this one in ‘Little Oklahoma’ near Tulare, Calif., makes authorities
fearful of the health and morals of dust bowl fugitives.” The accompanying text
offered a definition: “the ‘Okies,’ as the refugees are called (from Oklahoma),
occupy forest service camp grounds,” but the “overflow goes into ‘jungles’ of
tents and shabby shacks which authorities view as breeding places of disease,
crime, immorality and general misery.” On 9 August 1938 the Riverside Daily
Press printed an optimistic article, “Flow of Indigents to State
Slowing Down”: “‘Okies’ from Oklahoma, and ‘Arkies’ from Arkansas are few and
far between,” reported Robert Campbell,” an officer at a state plant quarantine
border station in Blythe. More realistically, in a lecture reported in the
Santa Cruz Sentinel for 25 August 1938, Frank Emery Cox
declared, “Tobacco Road has really come to California and for the first time in
history, this state has rural slums and unlike the tenements of the large
cities, they are populated by ‘poor white trash’ from other states.
Approximately 60 per cent of these migrants arrived from six states of the
south and southwest. Oklahoma contributed almost 26 per cent, or one out of
every four.” On 26 October 1938 the New Orleans Times-Picayune showed
that the terms “Arkies” and “Okies” had spread across the country: “Not since
the gold rush of ’49 has there been such a migration to California. So many
have flocked there from Arkansas and Oklahoma they are called Arkies and
Okies.” A 19 November 1938 article in the Oakland Tribune, “Bankers
Would Colonize Dust Bowl Migrants on California Farms,” repeated this
terminology while attaching it to a more general geographical area than
Oklahoma and Arkansas: “Middle Westerners--known in California as Oakies [sic]
and Arkies—trailed into the State, their meagre belongings piled high on
ancient automobiles.” The financial theorist Roger W. Babson in the Brownsville
Herald of 3 September 1939 used “Okie” to be inclusive—“During the past few
years, thousands of ‘Okies’ (refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and
Colorado), the unemployed, the footlo[o]se, and the half-baked from all states
have drifted to Southern California where it is warm and sunny the year round.”
On 25 October 1939 the Charleston (SC) Evening Post, influenced
by John Steinbeck, “Okies” as an inclusive term for all the migrants: “the
thousands of ‘Okies,’ dust-bowl refugees from Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and
Texas, and thousands of Mexicans from southern California, sat on their heels
while the sun dried out fields dampened by yesterday’s rain. Many of these are
types portrayed by characters in John Steinbeck’s controversial novel ‘The
Grapes of Wrath.’”
The refugees from Oklahoma in fact
constituted only [xxxxCheck]% of the 1930s migrants to California. On 21 December
1939, far into the reception of The Grapes of Wrath, the Abilene Reporter-News printed
a new scare headline—“NEGROES COMING!” A Stanford professor had said that “a
great migration of negroes from the cotton lands of the South to California is
only a matter of time. When it comes, he added, the recent migration of white
victims of the dustbowl—the Okies and the Arkies—will seem trifling by
comparison.” (In the 1850s Oregon had tried to exclude all negroes from the
state. Now, as it turned out, negroes came, and sometimes together with whites
on Kaiser trains which brought workers to wartime shipyards—but in
disproportion; the Portland Oregonian on 3 October 1942 said
84 negroes had arrived out of 1160 men. I rode west on a mixed Kaiser worker-military
train in mid-1942 and remember white soldiers but no blacks at all) The Daily
News in the Texas panhandle town of Pampa (right in the middle of the
Dust Bowl) on 9 August 1939 printed three associated articles on The
Grapes of Wrath, which had been a sensation since its publication in
April. The overall headline was “The R[oving] R[eporter] Probes
‘Okie’ Rumpus And Presents Two Book Reviews.” The Reporter, fresh from an
exploratory trip to California, issued this call: “All right, Okies, let’s have
your attention for a little while—that’s what they call you Oklahomans in some
places out in California, and they don’t smile particularly when they say it,
and you don’t smile either. You may not even be from Oklahoma. You may be from
Texas, or Arkansas, or even from Kansas, but you’re an Okie to a certain type
of Californian, and he hasn’t got much use for you if you are living from hand
to mouth as some 300,000 Okies are doing right now in the San Joaquin, the
Santa Clara and in other productive valleys.” In the heart of Steinbeck country
the reporter had experienced a striking encounter: “Many of the migrants resent
being called ‘Okies.’ In a Salinas cafe, we met a tall, strong, handsome young
fellow, Tony Dehls, who by the way used to work at the Courthouse cafe in
Pampa. Tony is a native of Arkansas. He said that he had been thrown in jail
seven times as a result of fights with persons who had called him ‘Okie and
didn’t smile.’” American men and many boys still read Owen Wister’s The
Virginian, and many of those who hadn’t read the book knew the 1929 movie
in which Gary Cooper (you can call up a clip in a moment now) says, “You wanta
call me that, SMILE.”
In The
Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck has a man at the Colorado River
explain: "Well, Okie use'ta 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." Into his frequently repeated words
“goddamn Okie” Steinbeck focused all the currents of contempt and hatred
swirling in the 1930s. By making the man declare that the old descriptive
meaning had been replaced, Steinbeck fixed “Okie” as the new inclusive term for
the scum invading California. As much as he sympathized with his Joads,
Steinbeck more than anyone else established “Okies” as a hate term. Born near
Comanche, Oklahoma (and carried right away to the Rio Grande for five years),
my mother born in Guymon, Oklahoma Territory and my father born in Wister,
Indian Territory. I went to school in
LeFlore County 1845-1952. (In the summer of 1952 when I was an apprentice
telegrapher on the AT&SF Railroad in Red Rock, Oklahoma, oversupplies of
tickets to IT and OT destinations were hanging on big bras hooks, still valid).
Having gained a Master’s at Northwestern in 1960 and a PhD in 1963 before
working at the University of Illinois, Northwestern, the University of
California, and the University of Delaware, I am a living authority on this
hate term. It persists in American universities with ludicrous malice. In the
1970s a clutch of associate professors, unpromotable at a major western university,
ignored my challenging news about Mark Twain and Norman Mailer in order to
grill me about my accent, although they knew my background already. In the
1980s and early 1990s at conferences a relentlessly self-aggrandizing writer on
Melville, a high functioning moron, from across a room regularly called out, “There’s
Hershel Parker, who hails from Oklahoma.” It took an hour’s talk with Ken Kesey
in the 1970s to begin to rid me of the shame I had internalized and start me
toward writing about who the white (or mainly white) Indian Territory settlers
were and how they got there.
No comments:
Post a Comment