CALIFORNIA: The Okies

CALIFORNIA The Okies

Around Salinas, Calif., the dark, rich soil is crossed with vivid green avenues of lettuce that stretch almost unbroken from one side of the valley to the other. On the south they end at the base of dry, rocky hills. On the north they end at the shining waters of Monterey Bay, where coves and inlets penetrate, unseen until a watcher is almost upon them, between the level cultivated fields. At the height of the season the 4,500 pickers who swarm over these fields, to take from them their average annual yield of 500,000,000 heads of lettuce, seem diminutive and remote in the immensity of dark earth and bright green leaves, the hills and the Bay.

To Salinas, as to most California agricultural communities, swarms of migrants began to come early in Depression. They were Okies. They swarmed over the State in vast tidal waves, drawn by reports of men needed for the cantaloupe harvest in the Imperial Valley, foe cotton picking in the San Joaquin Valley, for the asparagus and celery of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.

Though California knew the Okies well, most of the U. S. heard little of them until the book and movie of The Grapes of Wrath fixed a picture of them in the public mind. It was a powerful, melodramatic picture of simple, poetic-speaking, well-meaning, violent people, relentlessly harried by hard times, whose efforts to organize were smashed by vigilantes, whose will was not broken although all society was against them, all growers their mortal enemies.

How much truth is in that picture? Leathery-faced Philip Bancroft, well-hated member of the executive committee of California’s Associated Farmers and a fluent hater of John Steinbeck, says, “About as much as there was in Prohibition beer.” Owlish, bespectacled California Commissioner of Immigration and Housing Carey McWilliams, who enrages growers by plumping for collective farms to solve California’s farm problem, says, “It was true two years ago, is not so true now.”

Little Oklahoma. Watching the coming of the Okies as closely as Novelist Steinbeck was a Salinas grower named Elton Hebbron, a middleaged, easygoing man who owned about 120 rolling acres east of Salinas that could not be profitably farmed. He cut it up into small lots, sold it to migrants for $300 to $400 a lot on easy terms, made money. By 1935 the plot was a swarming, crowded, unsightly assemblage of trailers, tents, rusting jalopies, shacks, like innumerable other Little Oklahomas beside farm towns.

Now Little Oklahoma has become East Salinas, unincorporated, with a population of some 6,000, half of them former migrants. The original Hebbron tract has become Hebbron Heights with new stucco or brightly painted five-room frame houses crowding out vestiges of the old tar-paper shacks.

East Salinas is better established than most migrant-built towns, because Salinas packing sheds provide steadier work. Californians do not like to talk about migrants successfully absorbed into California life, for fear of attracting more migrants. Social workers worry about the danger that Little Oklahomas may become “rural slums.” But they note that health statistics are normal, juvenile delinquency shows no upping in Little Oklahomas, that such towns are “teeming with hopeful life. . . .

” California agriculture is a taut, highly organized, high-speed industry, requiring large numbers of skilled and semiskilled workmen—as well as untrained migrants —workmen to trim, grade and pack its produce, fill its refrigerator cars in no time, get its highly perishable fruit from tree to market without loss. (Apricots must be picked in 14 to 16 hours or the grower stands to lose his year’s work.) This month the season for California’s migrants begins in earnest. From now through September, maturing crops will pull men over the highways as the sun ripens successively the asparagus, cantaloupes, onions, tomatoes, cherries, pears and apples in midsummer, culminating in the harvest of fruit in the early fall that requires 145,000 seasonal workers in one month. Relatively few are the wandering Joads hired from the highway: to ship its 24,000 carloads of lettuce. Salinas pays some $78,000 in wages for car-loaders, $73,500 to the lidders who clamp lids on some 7,000.000 crates, $36,000 to the men who ice the refrigerator cars, from 60¢ to 80¢ an hour for packers, trimmers, ice men, truckers, paper folders, crate icers, crate liners, labelers.

Since migrants began to pour into California, growers and migrants have faced a crisis each season with bitter strikes in the Imperial valley in 1933-34, Salinas in 1936, Stockton in 1937, Madera County in 1939. Whether or not they face another in the next six months, there was no question that the attitude toward migrants has changed.

> To check aimless, expensive, rumor-inspired wanderings, Texas State Employment Service officials conferred with Californians. Texas has 600,000 migrants, 450,000 of them Mexicans. Before 1936 they spread over the State: West Texas migrants drawn by tales of good crops and high pay in the East passed westbound migrants drawn by the same story about the West. Employment service catalogued the labor needs of every farm in every county (spanning a distance as great as that from Detroit to New York), planted supervisors at crossroads to trace the ebb & flow of men, set up 106 control stations, now delivers as many seasonal workers as a farmer needs (and no more) on the day he calls for them.

> Politically conscious California no longer sneers at the Okies. Says Philip Bancroft: “They are fine people, farmers, just like ourselves. And it wasn’t the Dust Bowl that drove them out of Oklahoma; it was the failure of the New Deal’s farm program.” Biggest complaint of growers: higher relief rates in California than in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

>Whatever the next six months bring to the Okies, both Radical Carey McWilliams and Conservative Philip Bancroft agree on one thing: that California could assimilate the migrants of the past ten years if new arrivals did not increase the strain.