Hard Times by Richard Striner

Author:Richard Striner [Striner, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Penniless dust bowl refugees near Bakersfield, California, in 1935.

Photograph by Dorothea Lange.

Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By 1935, roughly half a million people in Texas, Oklahoma, and adjacent states were left homeless after dust storms literally buried their homes or made them totally uninhabitable. In any case, the drought made farming impossible in much of the affected area. And thus began the great migration of thousands of “Okies” who took to the road in obsolete and rundown automobiles piled high with people and possessions. They headed west to seek jobs and employment on the West Coast, where many of them would be greeted with immense hostility because their presence swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Others were reduced to the kind of peonage on southern California fruit ranches that was comparable to some of the worst conditions of sharecroppers in the South.

The spectacle of America—the land of “spacious skies and amber waves of grain”—being scourged in this manner brought a feeling of sickening anxiety that added to an overall mood of desperation and despair well outside of the prairie states.

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