Less than a hundred years ago, in continental America, ecological and economic disaster precipitated mass migration across state lines by hungry, destitute and desperate men, woman and children.
Like those seeking entry to the wealthy west today, these migrants undertook long and arduous journeys from their homelands in search of hope and opportunity. Like current migrants they were met with fear and discrimination at their destinations. Like current migrants they often survived in shambolic, tent cities with few facilities.
The Great Depression created a devastating, economic downturn that rolled over year-on-year for close to a decade. In the farming lands of the southwestern Great Plains this was compounded by drought which, coupled with detrimental agricultural practices, dried the topsoil to dust. This was then blown away by strong winds. Inhabitants of the dustbowl — mostly small, family homesteaders — no longer had a land to farm or a livelihood to eke out.
This seminal period in US history followed a decade of extraordinary economic growth in America. In popular culture, the roaring 20s are recalled as a decadent time edged with a frisson of danger — glamorous flappers with risqué morays, smokey jazz clubs and illicit drinking dens. It also saw the creation of an unprecedented consumer culture.
Large department stores were established like Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue with merchandise attractively displayed and facilities like toilets and cafes provided for shoppers. Credit was easy and innovative consumer goods became widely accessible and affordable. Household appliances eased the housewife’s load. Car production grew and grew until soon America was producing 85% of world’s cars. By 1929, half of all American families owned a car — this didn’t happen in England until 1980! US film production quickly overtook its competitors in the old world exporting the seemingly gilded ‘American way of life’.
This drive towards mass consumption was aided by Edward Bernays — a nephew of Sigmund Freud. A war-time propagandist with the Committee on Public Information, Bernays sought to apply psychological insights to marketing of merchandise. Very successfully, as it turns out. He sought to market aspirations and dreams rather than just ‘goods’ bounded by their practical applications. One of his more famous campaigns was when he persuaded women’s liberation activists to smoke openly at an Easter parade in 1929 at a time when public smoking by women was forbidden. Bernays presented this as an act of defiance calling the cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’
It was also a deeply conservative time and marred by increasing inequality. The vast fortunes of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegie and others allowed lives of extraordinary privilege and power. John D. Rockefeller, were he alive today, would be a multi-billionaire. At the same time, up to 40% of American lived in poverty. Corporate profits ballooned but wages flatlined. Small farms struggled and many faced foreclosure which contributed to rural decline and depopulation.
Striking workers faced often violent repression by industry owners backed by the government and the labour movement struggled. Anti-immigrant attitudes and racism were prevalent — the Ku Klux Klan was revived and thrived in the 1920s casting its net of bigotry beyond Black Americans to take in Jews and immigrants.
The psyche of the American public was still scarred by the carnage of World War One that had taken the lives of over 100,000 American soldiers and the Spanish ‘flu that followed which put 700,00 souls in early graves.
On 24 October 1929, during this era of starkly contrasting fates and fortunes, the stock market nose-dived and share prices plummeted. Rockefeller’s fortune — the greatest in American history — lost 80% of its value. But most regular Americans didn’t have stocks and so the market collapse did not alone cause the economic depression. Rather the panic that followed it combined with declining consumer demand fostered by rising inequality and wages that had failed to track inflation created a perfect storm.
As consumer demand dropped businesses laid off workers worsening the spiral. President Herbert Hoover erected high tariff walls on imported goods in a bid to protect American business but other countries quickly reciprocated leading to a slump in US exports. Panicked bankers began calling in loans and denying credit. A run on the banks exacerbated the problem. In 1932, 2300 banks collapsed taking people’s life saving with them and contributing further to the atmosphere of hysteria gripping the country.
Hoover attempted to quell fears, ineffectively.
In 1932, impoverished WW1 veterans demanded early payment of a promised ‘bonus payment’ not due until 1945.Thousands of impoverished vets and their families camped in Washington DC setting up a tent city dubbed Hooverville. Hoover deployed the army to drive out the vets and torch the tents. This proved a public relations disaster for the president.
The cycle of despair and poverty continued to deepen and more and more of the poor were reduced to living in Hoovervilles on the outskirts of cities. To compound all this, farming families, already struggling with falling prices for their crops were hit with droughts. Land clearance left soil exposed and arid conditions dried it creating massive dust storms and reducing farm land to desert. Assistance from federal or state authorities was non-existent.
Those in affected areas — mainly Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma — had little choice but to abandon their homes in search of work. California was a popular destination due to its seasonal fruit-picking work. These so-called Okies encountered border blockades and many were turned away or deported back to their home states.
The inhumanity and injustice endured by the migrants was documented by some artists and activists. Woodie Guthrie, himself an Okie, chronicled the migrant trail from Oklahoma to California with his music.
In his ballad ‘This land is your land’ he lamented the destitution suffered by these fellow Americans:
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
John Steinbeck described the hardships experienced by the migrant workers in articles published by the San Francisco Post in 1936 which informed his later masterpiece ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ while the photographer Dorethea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ series helped publicise their stark circumstances.
In the first hundred days of his presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced sweeping measures to stem the economic crisis and mitigate the human costs. His ‘New Deal’ created a welfare safety net to protect the poorest and steadied the economy over the coming years, however, the outbreak of World War Two was ultimately responsible for reviving the American economy.
Roosevelt’s enlarged, powerful federal government unsettled conservatives who feared it put the US on a path to socialism and undermined free enterprise. Their anti New Deal rhetoric still resonates with contemporary Republican circles where the federal government is viewed as corrupt and overly involved in the affairs of Americans.
Jacqueline Fitzgibbon 
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