The Worst Hard Time

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at CSU East Bay

Kevin P. Dincherwww.kevindincher.com

Louisiana Swing (1954)• Bud Hobbs

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Oklahoma!

1930: Green Grow the Lilacs• Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899 – 1954)• Claremore, OK Territory (1906)

1943: Broadway Musical• Rogers and Hammerstein

1955: Film• Shirley Jones• Gordon MacRae

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The Worst Hard Time

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California

America’s Self-image Manifest Destiny

Progressive Era Gilded Age Conservation/

Environmentalism

Dust Bowl

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The Dust Bowl

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The Great Plains

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The American Prairie

The Dirty 30s

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The Newsreel

Hearst Metrotone News (1914–1967)

Pathé News (1910–1956) RKO Radio Pictures (1931 to 1947) Warner Brothers (1947 to 1956)

Paramount News (1927–1957)

Fox Movietone News (1928–1963)

Universal Newsreel (1929–1967

The March of Time (1935–1951)

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1935 – 1943: Works Progress Administration (WPA)

(1939: Work Projects Administration)

Goal Provide one paid job for all families in which the

breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment.

Cost 1938: $1.4 billion Total: $13.4 billion

Jobs Provided 1938: 3.3 million employees Total: Employed almost 8 million people

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Hoover DamConstructed: 1931 – 1936

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Golden Gate BridgeConstructed: 1933 – 1937

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San Francisco-Oakland Bay BridgeConstructed: 1933 – 1936

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CA Highway 1Completed: 1937

Bixby Canyon Bridge 1932

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Coit Tower1933

Murals were done under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project

The first of the New Deal federal employment programs for artists

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Cradle Will Rock: 1999 Tim Robbins film: chronicles the process and events that surrounded the production of the original 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock written by Marc Blitzstein and financed by the WPA Federal Theater Project

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Tex Ritter

1935 – 1936: Resettlement Administration (RA)

1937 – 1945: Farm Security Administration (FSA)

Goal: Move 650,000 people from

100 million acres

Objections: Socialistic Tenant Farmers

1935 – 1936: Resettlement Administration (RA)

1937 – 1945: Farm Security Administration (FSA)

Results: Few thousand moved from 9,000,000 acres

200 Greenbelt communities/cities

Relief camps for about 75,000 migrant workers in California

Film, photography and folk song projects

Resettlement Administration (RA) Folk Songs Project

Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903 – 1995) 1936 – 1957: collected music More than 100 hours of songs

Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress

WPA Northern CA Music Project: The first large-scale effort to collect ethnic recordings in

a region. Oct. 28, 1938: Officially opened on at 2108 Shattuck

Avenue in Berkeley. 1940: shut down when funding was not renewed.

Resettlement Administration (RA) Film Project

The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) The River (1938)

Resettlement Administration (RA) Photography Project

Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) Walker Evans (1903 – 1975) Arthur Rothstein (1915 – 1985)

The Dust Bowl Through the Lens: How Photography Revealed and Helped Remedy a National Disaster (Martin W. Sandler)

Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) Columbia UniversityApprenticed under

Clarence White Arnold Genthe

1918: San FranciscoGreat Depression

Resettlement Administration (RA)

Farm Security Administration (FSA)

Migrant Mother, 1936Florence Owens Thompson

Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner

Mississippi Delta Children

Children in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942

Japanese-owned grocery store in Oakland, CA on March 30, 1942, two days before internment notices appeared.

The Enemy (1942)

The federal government suppressed most of the photographs she was hired to take during WWII.

97% of the images she took during the Japanese internment in California were never published.

Tagged Girl (1942)

Walker Evans (1903 – 1975)

Allie Mae Burroughs

Arthur Rothstein (1915 – 1985)

John Frederick of Grant County, North Dakota, shows how high his wheat would grow if there were no drought, (1936)

Drought refugees from South Dakota. (Montana, 1936)

Nursery school, FSA camp, Harlingen, Texas. Member of mother's committee watches (1942)

Fruit tramps from California who have come to the Yakima Valley (Washington) for apple thinning. (1936)

Oregon or bust. Leaving South Dakota for a new start in the Pacific Northwest (1936)

Annie Pettway Bendolph

Gee's Bend, Alabama (1937)

The Face of the Depression

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1933

2 million African Americans on “relief”•17.8% of African Americans•Compared to 5.9% of White Americans

1935

3.5 million African Americans on “relief” – 250,000 more with WPA jobs•35% of African Americans

193845% of African Americans were on “relief” or held WPA jobs

The Face of the Depression

WPA’s Federal Writers Project Ralph Ellison (novelist/essayist) Margaret Walker (poet) Zora Neale Hurston

(novelist/folklorist/anthropologist) Richard Nathaniel Wright (novelist)

WPA’s Federal Art Project William Henry Johnson Charles White

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The Dirty 30s

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John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968)

Okie Migration: 1930s

Not everyone who left the Dust Bowl and the Great Plains in the 1930s was from Oklahoma

Oklahoma Migrating west since about 1910 1930s: population declined by

15% Net loss: 440,000 people

1931—1933: 10% of OK farm owners lost

farms to foreclosure 60% of OK farmers were tenant

farmers

Okie Migration: 1930s

Not everyone who left the Great Plains and the Dust Bowl came to California …

…and not everyone who came to California was from the Great Plains.

Okie Migration: 1930s

California’s Population1930: 5.6 million1940: 6.9 million 1.3 million (+23%)

1 million were “Okie” immigrants

1940: Okies = 14.5% of the population 2010: Asians = 14.5% of the population

*2010: first time since the Gold Rush that native-born Californians make up a majority of the state’s population.

Okie Migration: 1930s

Not everyone who came to California was a farmer

Lawyers, bankers, doctors, teachers, merchants …

Okie Migration: 1930s

Not everyone who came to California settled in the Central Valley

38%: Los Angeles 62%: Central Valley farms

Okie Migration: 1930s

1936: Bum Blockade LA Police Chief

James Edgar "Two-Gun" Davis

136 officers 16 major points of

entry from Arizona, Nevada and Oregon

Turn back migrants with "no visible means of support."

Okie Migration: 1930s

1936: Bum Blockade Nancy Drew?

Encouraged Migration from other parts of the USA

1. Nativism

2. Agricultural Growth

3. Progressive Movement

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Encouraged Migration from other parts of the USA

Nativism

Gold Rush Native Americans Mexicans

Chinese (1850s onward)

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Encouraged Migration from other parts of the USA

2. Agricultural Growth 1890—1914

from large-scale ranching and grain-growing

to smaller-scale, intensive fruit cultivation

growth of canning, packing, food machinery, and transportation services

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California Agricultural# of Farms # of Farm Acres Farm Labor Force

1859 19,000 8,730,000 53,000

1899 73,000 28,829,000 151,000

1919 118,000 29,366,000 261,000

1929 136,000 30,443,000 332,000

1939 133,000 30,524,000 278,000

1949 137,000 36,613,000 304,000

1959 99,000 36,888,000 284,000

1969 78,000 35,328,000 240,000

1979 73,000 32,727,000 311,000

1989 83,000 30,590,000 416,000

1999 74,000 27,699,000 260,000

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Encouraged Migration from other parts of the USA

3. Progressive Movement

1890s – 1920s Gilded Age

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“California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see …”

Woody Guthrie

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Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin' home every day,Beatin' the hot old dusty way to the California line.'Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin' out of that old dust bowl,They think they're goin' to a sugar bowl, but here's what they find Now, the police at the port of entry say,"You're number fourteen thousand for today."

Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi, folks, you ain't got the do re mi,Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;But believe it or not, you won't find it so hotIf you ain't got the do re mi.

Woody Guthrie

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The Grapes of Wrath

Promised Land Exodus and Moses Tom Joad

Tom Sawyer and Little Women

Rugged Individualism Community

Three Part Solution Government – “Social Safety

Net” Farm Owners Cultural Assimilation (Religion)

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The Grapes of Wrath

Promised Land Exodus and Moses Tom Joad

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The Grapes of Wrath

Tom Sawyer and Little Women

Rugged Individualism Community

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The Grapes of Wrath

Three Part Solution Government

Social Safety Net Farm Owners Cultural Assimilation

Religion

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Louisiana Swing (1954)• Bud Hobbs

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Maddox Brothers and Rose America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly

Band

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