September 2008

It was an uneasy time in America, late summer 1939. The Roosevelt Recession — in which industrial production had tumbled by 40 percent, unemployment had jumped by four million, and stock prices had plunged by nearly 50 percent — was barely more than a year past. The jobless rate hovered above 17 percent; personal income and total economic output were no higher than they had been a decade before; and the unemployed streamed in to California’s heartland, taxing public services of all kinds.

The exodus had been underway for nearly a decade, with as many as four hundred thousand folks from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and other states flocking to California in search of a better life. “Uncle Sam Has His Own Refugee Problem,” declared the Providence Journal that spring. “Lured to the West, They Find Misery, Squalor, Disease.” Collier’s magazine printed: “An army is marching into California . . . made up of penniless unemployed, desperately seeking Utopia. ‘Here we are,’ say the invaders, ‘what’re you going to do about us?’ And nobody knows the answer.”