Most Americans still think of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the Okies who left it, in the bleak terms of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The long drought of the 1930s seared the land, while recurring winds swirled away the topsoil and black blizzards choked crops and cattle. During that decade, more than 350,000 farmers fled the state, leaving a legacy of deserted homes, barren lands and bitter people. In recent years the Dust Bowl has changed dramatically. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, who revisited the region, tells how and why in this report:
ON nights when subfreezing winds knife through the empty streets of Beaver and Boise City, "those who stayed" sometimes still hear the ghostly whimpers of thirsty children and the plaintive bleats of dying calves. Yet today Steinbeck's crucible of dust and storm is a wild and beautiful country, made fertile by deepwell irrigation. Clean, brisk air, coming more in waves than gusts, buffets the winter wheat and corn that thrust above the occasional snows and seem to sway in time to the thumping of the irrigation pumps. Everywhere a new spirit of enthusiasm and industry is at work. It is felt in Guymon (pop. 6,000), a feed-lot and meatpacking center that is already siphoning business away from Kansas City. There are still trailers here; now they are filled not with migrants but with expectant property owners awaiting completion of their $60,000 houses.
Good Life and Do-Sooders. At Weatherford (pop. 6,000), on the lip of the red-soil belt, small frame houses have given way to sprawling ranch-style -spreads inhabited by workers in new industries. "Our salaries are low by Northern standards," concedes Ed Berrong, an insurance man and a state senator. "But we just live a good life —until the do-gooders come down here from Washington and tell us we're poverty-stricken." In Okemah (pop. 2,900), an electronics plant provides a $30,000 monthly payroll, and merchants have responded with a modern Ben Franklin variety store and a new furniture shop. The plant manager applauds the recreational value of country living for his employees, the economics of low rents and wages for his company. Between the towns of Thomas and Putnam, the huge grain elevators of the McNeill Grain Co. reach toward the cloudless sky like a concrete calliope. The early morning sun, filtered through the wheat, gives the highway an eerie brownish-golden cast. One almost expects to see Dorothy and her four friends following the "yellow brick road" westward to the Emerald City.
Unlike most small towns in much of the South and Southwest, the rural communities of Oklahoma are booming, and it is there that most of the state's 2,600,000 residents live, labor and die. Most of the inhabitants are newly prosperous, conservative and white. These modern-day Okies believe in such old-fashioned values as work, initiative and pragmatism. They fear unions and blacks—and have been highly successful in excluding both. Organized labor is weak; the state's 163,000 blacks have no political influence, and even the 180,000 Indians are disorganized and ignored.