| This is a companion website
for James N. Gregory's American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and
Okie Culture in California (Oxford University Press, 1989). It
includes information about the prize-winning book and photographs and
links to further information about the Dust Bowl Migration and its
legacies.
From the dust jacket:
Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck's now
classic novel The Grapes of Wrath captured the epic story of an
Oklahoma farm family driven west to California by dust storms, drought,
and economic hardship. It was a story that generations of Americans have
also come to know through Dorothea Lange's unforgettable photos of
migrant families struggling to make a living in Depression-torn
California. Now in James N. Gregory's path-breaking American Exodus,
there is at least an historical study that moves beyond the fiction
of the 1930s to uncover the full meaning of these events.
American Exodus takes us back to the Dust Bowl migration of
the 1930s and the war boom influx of the 1940s to explore the
experiences of the more than one million Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans,
and Missourians who sought opportunities in California. Gregory reaches
into the migrant's lives to reveal not only their economic trials but
also their impact on California's culture and society. He traces the
development of an "Okie subculture" that over the years has grown into
an essential element in California's cultural landscape.
Gregory vividly depicts how Southwesterners brought with them
on their journey west an allegiance to evangelical Protestantism,
"plain-folk American" values, and a love of country music. These values
gave Okies an expanding cultural presence in their new home. In their
neighborhoods, often called "Little Oklahomas," they created a community
of churches and saloons, of church-goers and good-old-boys, mixing ster-minded
religious thinking with hard-drinking irreverence. Today, Baptist and
Pentecostal churches abound in this region; and from Gene
Autry--"Oklahoma's Singing Cowboy"--to Woody Guthrie, Bob Wills, and
Merle Haggard, the special concerns of Southwesterners have long
dominated the country music industry in California. The legacy of the
Dust Bowl migration can also be measured in political terms. throughout
California and especially in the San Joaquin Valley, Okies have
implanted their own brand of populist conservatism.
The consequences reach far beyond
California. The Dust Bowl migration was part of a larger heartland
diaspora that has sent millions of Southerners and rural Midwesterners
to the nation's northern and western industrial perimeter. American
Exodus is the first book to examine the cultural implications of that
massive 20th century population shift. In this rich account of the
experiences and impact of these migrant heartlanders, Gregory fills an
important gap in recent American social history.
Learn more about the Dust Bowl migration
View the
photo
essay that accompanies American Exodus
Read James Gregory's
"Dust Bowl
Legacies: The Okie Impact on California 1939-1989" (pdf) published
in California History (Fall 1989)
Read James Gregory's
"Dust Bowl Migration" published in
Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and
Policy, eds. Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O'Connor (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-Clio, 2004)
Listen to the
"Voices from
the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker
Collection 1940-41" Here you will find songs and interviews recorded
in the San Joaquin Valley migrant labor camps.
Read the oral history interviews in the
Dust Bowl
Migration Digital Archives. This is a collection of 53 interviews
conducted in 1980 and 1981 in Kern County, California.
Visit the Weedpatch Camp
website and learn about the restoration project at the camp that
John Steinbeck made famous.
James Gregory has a newer book that puts the Dust Bowl Migration in a
broader context:
The Southern
Diaspora: How The Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners
Transformed America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Contact:
James N.
Gregory
Department of History
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
gregoryj@u.washington.edu |
