Why historians no longer believe in the New Deal account of the ‘Dust Bowl’

Stephen Fender

• Dust-bowl Migrants in the American Imagination by Charles Shindo
  Kansas, 252 pp, £22.50, January 1997, ISBN 0 7006 0810 9
• In the Country of Country by Nicholas Dawidoff
  Faber, 365 pp, £12.99, June 1997, ISBN 0 571 19174 6

When people remember the Great American Depression they think of the Oklahoma farmsteads, of topsoil loosened by drought and blown off the land in massive storms that darkened the skies for days at a time. The ‘Okies’ headed west in their overloaded jalopies along the 1400 miles of Route 66 to Central Valley, California, but only a minority found work, and even that was temporary, poorly paid and back-breaking. Many migrants were forced to live along roadsides and on waste ground, washing and going to the toilet in ditches. Some found a tent or rough shack on a farm, where they were bullied and paid in scrip negotiable only at the company store. The lucky few found places in government-run camps, but the Government could not manufacture paying work out of thin air, and they had to move on, following the harvests of various crops through a cycle of place and season.