the farm was blown to kingdon come, so California here we come
The city folks weren’t the only ones experiencing good times during the 1920s. With the advent and proliferation of the modern tractor, mid-western farmers increased their productivity ten-fold in what they called “the great plow up.” They plowed and planted so much wheat that they actually drove prices down, and so, to maintain profits, they plowed and planted even more. Then, without much warning, they were suddenly hit with a trio of unimaginable catastrophes.
First, the stock market crash forced banks to foreclose on those that couldn’t pay their mortgages; then a drought killed off their crops, and then great dust storms of truly biblical proportions ravaged the entire mid-west and blew their farms all the way to the east coast. After losing everything and having heard tales of the easy ways of the west, those lucky enough to still have a car, lit out for California.
From fact to Fiction
Almost as events were unfolding, author John Steinbeck chronicled the exodus in his 1939 book, The Grapes of Wrath, which Hollywood set to film the following year. Both are now considered classics of the first order.
From Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, thousands of displaced persons poured into southern California where they found no work and strained the state’s relief efforts to the breaking point. The impoverished Okies, Arkies, and Texies of the dust bowl were not made welcome. Los Angeles tried to setup a “bum blockade” along the eastern entry-points, but the effort to stop them was unpopular and impossible.
Over 350,000 came west in 1935 and 36. They took work wherever they could find it, lived in shanty towns, and were universally shunned until the outbreak of World War II when they were finally absorbed into the general population as defense workers.