LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Dust Bowl: Dust Bowl Migration
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The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California.[7] With their land barren and homes seized in foreclosure, many farm families were forced to leave. Migrants left farms in Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico, but all were generally referred to as "Okies". The flight of Dust Bowl migrants became widely known from the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
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As the Dust Bowl saga worked its way into history, race has become still more important. The continuing fascination with this subject over the decades has had as much to do with racial politics as with the events themselves. As poverty became more and more racialized, and as struggles over social welfare programs increasingly contentious, the Dust Bowl migration took on new meanings and new functions. By the 1970s an aging generation of former migrants and their upwardly mobile offspring where ready to memorialize the experiences of the 1930s and another set of storytellers were ready to help. A new round of journalism, novels, history books, TV documentaries, and country music songs has been the result, much of it fed by a late 20th century need for stories of poverty, hardship, and eventual triumph where the victims are white. These latter-day Dust Bowl accounts have sometimes promoted conservative agendas, as in the collection of songs that Merle Haggard produced in the late 1960s and 1970s celebrating the struggles of his parents and implying that the poverty of their generation was more noble than the poverty of contemporary America.
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More than any other event of the 1930s, the migration of thousands of jobless and dispossessed Americans from the Dust Bowl states to the "promised land" of California evokes the hardships and despair of the Great Depression. In this innovative new study, Charles Shindo shows how the public memory of that migration has been dominated not by academic historians but by a handful of artists and would-be reformers.
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The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country. For almost seventy years the story of white families from Oklahoma and neighboring states making their way to California in the midst of the Great Depression has been kept alive by journalists and filmmakers, college teachers and museum curators, songwriters and novelists, and of course historians. Although it was but one episode out of many struggles with poverty during the 1930s, the Dust Bowl migration became something of synecdoche, the single most common image that later generations would use to memorialize the hardships of that decade. The continuing fascination with the Dust Bowl saga ... has something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice. It is a story that many Americans have needed to tell, for many different reasons.
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Reversing desertification will require a huge effort, but if the dust bowl continues to spread, it will not only undermine the economy, but it will ... trigger a massive migration eastward. The options are clear: Reduce livestock populations to a sustainable level or face heavy livestock losses as grassland turns to desert. Return highly erodible cropland to grassland or lose all of the land's productive capacity as it turns to desert. Construct windbreaks with a combination of trees and, where feasible, wind turbines, to slow the wind or face even more soil losses and dust storms.
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This set of 20 photographs depicts the ravages of the Midwest and the sense of futility and hopelessness caused by the dust bowl of the 1930s. Graphically illustrates the devastation of land and property and the forced migration of thousands of families. Includes pictures of deserted towns, raging dust storms, eroded farms turned into deserts, and sharecroppers and townspeople forced to migrate west in their ancient jalopies. Each picture 11" x 14". Captions. Documentary Photo Aids.
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Dust Bowl Migration