The Dust Bowl Migration May Not Have Been Quite What We Thought
Dust Bowl farmers didn’t flee Oklahoma, says a new working paper on Depression-era migration
Oklahoma farm-worker families working in California in the late 1930s became the face of the Dust Bowl migration. But farmers were actually more likely than other Oklahoma workers to stay put, while Oklahomans were no more likely to move to California than to other states, new research suggests. PHOTO: DOROTHEA LANGE/FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS VIA AP
American folklore tells of a Depression-era exodus of farmers from the Midwest Dust Bowl to the promised land of California.
But what if the “Grapes of Wrath” story wasn’t a common tale?
Fans of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie may take interest in a working paper published this week by the National Bureau for Economic Research. The study, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, concludes there’s been a fundamental misunderstanding of who moved out of, stayed in, and avoided the Dust Bowl states of Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and Texas.
Jason Long of Wheaton College and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbiawrite Dust Bowl farmers largely stayed in place and those who would have migrated out of the region did so at only a “slightly higher” pace than the previous decade. The real story was the rise in folks who decided to avoid the affected states.
The Dust Bowl was a long-lasting drought striking the Southern Plains region during the 1930s exacerbated by soil-eroding farming techniques that led to an unprecedented collapse in some of the nation’s most productive farmland.
History books and novels like Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” tell of a desperate migration done in the shadows of the Great Depression. In an echo of today’s troubles, it was America’s own refugee crisis. Many of these migrants fled the hard hit-red soils of Oklahoma, with “Okies” perceived to be a key force in California’s growth and culture. It’s a large part of how Golden State city Bakersfield became the West Coast capital of country music, and how a native-borne Californian Merle Haggard could sing “Okie from Muskogee.”
But, the authors write, “the westward push from the Dust Bowl to California was unexceptional.”
“Migrants from the Dust Bowl were no more likely to move to California than migrants from any other part of the country,” Mssrs. Long and Siu said. “Instead, Dust Bowl migrants made relatively ‘local’ moves, tending to remain in a Dust Bowl-affected state.”
They find, instead, that “the depopulation of the Dust Bowl was due largely to a sharp drop in migration inflows.”
The paper’s authors acknowledged that the Dust Bowl region did see a “marked depopulation,” with the hardest-hit counties losing 20% of their residents. The affect was also long-lasting. But that in part owes to the increased mechanization of agriculture, which meant those who left would not have found jobs to return to.
According to the paper, the economic story of the Dust Bowl was nowhere near as bad as many understand it to be now.
“Migration from the Dust Bowl was not associated with long-lasting negative labor market effects, and for farmers, the effects were positive,” they wrote.
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