Nation: Oklahoma 1970: The Dust Bowl of the ’30s Revisited

Most Americans still think of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the Okies who left it, in the bleak terms of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The long drought of the 1930s seared the land, while recurring winds swirled away the topsoil and black blizzards choked crops and cattle. During that decade, more than 350,000 farmers fled the state, leaving a legacy of deserted homes, barren lands and bitter people. In recent years the Dust Bowl has changed dramatically. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, who revisited the region, tells how and why in this report:

ON nights when subfreezing winds knife through the empty streets of Beaver and Boise City, “those who stayed” sometimes still hear the ghostly whimpers of thirsty children and the plaintive bleats of dying calves. Yet today Steinbeck’s crucible of dust and storm is a wild and beautiful country, made fertile by deepwell irrigation. Clean, brisk air, coming more in waves than gusts, buffets the winter wheat and corn that thrust above the occasional snows and seem to sway in time to the thumping of the irrigation pumps. Everywhere a new spirit of enthusiasm and industry is at work. It is felt in Guymon (pop. 6,000), a feed-lot and meatpacking center that is already siphoning business away from Kansas City. There are still trailers here; now they are filled not with migrants but with expectant property owners awaiting completion of their $60,000 houses.

Good Life and Do-Sooders. At Weatherford (pop. 6,000), on the lip of the red-soil belt, small frame houses have given way to sprawling ranch-style -spreads inhabited by workers in new industries. “Our salaries are low by Northern standards,” concedes Ed Berrong, an insurance man and a state senator. “But we just live a good life —until the do-gooders come down here from Washington and tell us we’re poverty-stricken.” In Okemah (pop. 2,900), an electronics plant provides a $30,000 monthly payroll, and merchants have responded with a modern Ben Franklin variety store and a new furniture shop. The plant manager applauds the recreational value of country living for his employees, the economics of low rents and wages for his company. Between the towns of Thomas and Putnam, the huge grain elevators of the McNeill Grain Co. reach toward the cloudless sky like a concrete calliope. The early morning sun, filtered through the wheat, gives the highway an eerie brownish-golden cast. One almost expects to see Dorothy and her four friends following the “yellow brick road” westward to the Emerald City.

Unlike most small towns in much of the South and Southwest, the rural communities of Oklahoma are booming, and it is there that most of the state’s 2,600,000 residents live, labor and die. Most of the inhabitants are newly prosperous, conservative and white. These modern-day Okies believe in such old-fashioned values as work, initiative and pragmatism. They fear unions and blacks—and have been highly successful in excluding both. Organized labor is weak; the state’s 163,000 blacks have no political influence, and even the 180,000 Indians are disorganized and ignored.

Fortunes and Misfortune. This does not mean that all white Oklahomans enjoy the good life. The small farmer’s existence is marginal; many must hold other jobs to feed their families. Near Balko, where his grandfather settled in 1907, Travis Boston, 39, figures that he may be the last of his family to cling to farming. He owns 320 acres and leases an equal amount of land to raise wheat and graze his 40 head of cattle, but he has to operate a Phillips 66 gas station as well. He needs more acreage if he is to make farming profitable, but claims that the banks will not lend him any money, while “doctors and lawyers buy the land at inflated prices for tax write-offs.”

Some of Oklahoma’s present fortunes were made off the misfortune of earlier Okies. In the Dust Bowl days, recalls Rancher Ross Labrier, “the small ranchers who had about 160 acres fled first.

Those who didn’t leave joined the WPA. We bought the repossessed lands from the bank.” Near Kenton, Labrier bought up land at $15 an acre. He now owns 23,000 acres valued at $2,300,000 and has 400 cattle.

Aquatic Paradise. The key to the Dust Bowl’s transformation is the recent availability and control of water. It was always there, but it either lay inaccessible 500 feet below the surface, or turned to torrents in destructive floods. The answer to both problems was dams. Senator Mike Monroney championed the ranchers in the western part of the state who wanted small reservoirs for their dry-land irrigation. Until his death in 1963, Senator Robert S. Kerr lobbied for large flood-control dams in the river-ravaged east. As Monroney recently explained it: “We incorporated the little-dam program into the big-dam program to create the best damn program in the Senate.”

Mainly through Kerr’s Washington influence, the eastern part of the state has been transformed from dusty scrub land into an aquatic paradise. Its 679 square miles of water make its ratio of water to land higher than Minnesota’s. The Oologah, Pensacola and Eufaula reservoirs are immense. Keystone, Heyburn, Thunderbird, Hulah—the lakes multiply as fast as Senate bills. Atoka, Fort Gibson, Markham Ferry, Tenkiller Ferry, Wister; the new recreational waters created by dams abound with boats, water-skiers and fishermen. They also mean more tourists and more money.

There is still more water to come. Kerr’s last big project—linking the Arkansas, Verdigris and Mississippi rivers with the Gulf of Mexico by means of 17 locks and 27 reservoirs—will make Tulsa a seaport. Covering 450 miles and costing $1.3 billion, the project is the largest ever undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It is expected to add 36,000 jobs to the Tulsa area, help the city on its way to becoming one of the most attractive in the Southwest, and sharply increase land values. The port of Catoosa (pop. 906), 750 river miles inland, already enjoys a parade of new mercantile buildings along U.S. 66, the route over which the Goad family (changed to Joad by Steinbeck in his book) made its westward flight.

Rural Relocation. Now the movement is into, rather than away from Oklahoma. Escaping metropolitan racial problems and physical decay, residents elsewhere are responding to Governor Dewey Bartlett’s notion of rural relocation for both industry and individuals. Since his election as Governor in 1966, Republican Bartlett has made his pitch personally to 106 presidents of the nation’s top 500 companies, calculates that he has attracted $422 million worth of new industry and 26,300 jobs. He has even mailed 58,000 letters to former Oklahomans, inviting them to return to the state. Some 11,000 have expressed an interest.

“This is God’s country,” says Sallisaw Methodist Minister Don Williams, “and I ought to know.” Adds one Sallisaw native: “Every time they have an earthquake or a hippie rebellion in California, another handful of Okies comes back home.” That mixture of parochial pride and disdain for urban problems elsewhere may yet make Oklahoma one of the last bastions of white, middle-class American society.